Free Meals For Doctors Mean Higher Profit For Drug Companies, Study Suggests

A new study has discovered that doctors who were bought meals by drug companies had a higher tendency to write prescription of a branded drug instead of an equivalent drug which costs much cheaper. This simply means that the more meals drug companies pay for, the greater the chances of prescribing the selected drug.

The study found that doctors in the United States who received one free meal from a drug company were more likely to write a prescription for the drug the company was promoting compared to doctors who have never received such meals, The Wall Street Journal reported.

"Payments for food and beverages are by the far the most frequent type of industry payments to physicians in the United States, totaling about $225 million in 2014, the most recent year for which data are available," said Dr. Robert Steinbrook, an editor at JAMA Internal Medicine and a professor at Yale University School of Medicine.

Every year, the United States spends $73 billion on branded drugs. Senior author of the study Dr. R. Adams Dudley of the University of California, San Francisco said that patient's pay $24 billion for the branded drugs even though there is an equivalent generic drugs available at a much cheaper price. "That's an awful lot of money," said Dudley in a phone interview. According to Fox News, he explained saying: "The brand name drugs and the generics are 'so similar that there's no benefit,' from using the brand name versions."

According to NBC News, Dr. Dudley and his colleagues analyzed prescribing information for four popular drugs from approximately 280,000 Medicare physicians and found that the doctors in the study received some kind of benefit, nearly all meals, worth $20 or less in which the four drugs like cholesterol-lowering drug rosuvastatin (brand-name Crestor), the blood pressure drugs nebivolol (brand-name Bystolic) and olmesartan medoxomil (Benicar) and the antidepressant desvenlafaxine (Pristiq) were mentioned.

They team also noticed that those who got more than 4meals to discuss the 4 drugs prescribed Crestor almost twice as often as doctors who didn't get any free meals. Other drug prescription that grew as meals also grew were, Bystolic more than five times as often, Benicar more than four times as often and Pristig 3.4 times as often.

The American Medical Association limits physician "gifts" to $100 or less, and many academic medical centers now don't allow drug reps on the premises. "At UCSF they can't even give us free samples, Kaiser doesn't let drug reps in, for instance," Dudley said. "Even without laws some organizations are responding."