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Pharmaceutical companies have clever ways to persuade doctors to prescribe their medicines to patients. Many companies organize annual or quarterly company conferences in tourist destinations for the doctors and their families. These annual or quarterly trips are on the company’s account; and they are nothing more than bribes to coax doctors into their folds. This does not stop here; pharmaceutical companies continue their influences on doctors with regular small gifts such as pens, calendars, watches and samples. Also given are occasional luxurious gifts that are provided to alter a doctor’s decisions in favor of the company.
If you ask doctors about the effect that these strategies have on them, they will usually tell you that they are used to it and it does not in any way influence their decision about the drug. They will claim that their prescriptions are based only upon proven efficacy of the pharmaceutical drug in question. Only after they are sure it is capable of curing their patients, will they recommend it to their patients. If you ask a pharmaceutical company about this, if you can get through to someone in there who has the inside scoop, they will tell you that everyone is doing this. They will tell you, and probably rightly too, that they have to do this sort of public bribery in order to survive. They can even provide you with gory details of companies that have gone the righteous way and went right down the drain. Pharmaceutical companies use the gifts to just grab a doctor’s attention and according to a recent research by the Journal of the American Medical Association, these strategies are very effective.
The question for you, though, is when your doctor prescribes a drug to you, how do you know it is not a result of that latest trip to Hawaii, all expenses paid; and if it is, will the drug really help you?