41 - Conflicts of interest – industry gifts to physicians

Summary

Drug companies exert influence on physicians' practice behaviors by bestowing a wide variety of gifts on them, from trinkets to gourmet dinners and travel reimbursements to attend company sponsored meetings. Most physicians who accept gifts from drug companies deny that they are influenced to prescribe that company's drug over other, or generic, drugs of equal merit. The moral cost of the obligation of gifts is the erosion of the physician's professional image. The hope is that academic medical centers, which have responsibility for educating and training physicians, will have an influence in shaping the attitude of future physicians toward these conflicts of interests. Accepting gifts creates obligations for physicians that are in direct conflict with their obligations to patients. Voluntary guidelines by professional medical organizations have had very little effect in curbing drug companies' influences on physician practices.