Fed: Med students warned on drug company freebies

AAP General News (Australia)
04-18-2004
Fed: Med students warned on drug company freebies

By Kylie Walker, National Medical Correspondent

SYDNEY, April 18 AAP - Medical students who accept gifts from drug companies risk harming
their future patients through biased prescribing practices, a team of Australian doctors
has warned.

Books, pens, food and medical equipment are among the gifts presented to medical students
by pharmaceutical companies, which collectively spent about $1.3 billion on drug promotion
in Australia last year.

Associate Professor Wendy Rogers and colleagues from Flinders University, the University
of Adelaide and the Women's and Children's Hospital said students may believe there's
no harm in accepting such gratuities because they are not yet seeing patients.

However, they wrote in the latest Medical Journal of Australia, gifts create a conscious
or unconscious desire to do the gift-giver a favour.

"The obligation, although often tacit, is very real - prescribe this company's drugs
rather than any alternatives," Assoc Prof Rogers said.

As a result, the student's future patients may not get the medicine most suitable for
their condition.

Rendering students beholden to drug companies also carried potential implications for
the reform and evolution of medicine, she said.

"Accepting gifts potentially silences medical students as critics of industry-profession
relationships," Assoc Prof Rogers explained.

"This means that society loses the important contribution to reform provided by young
people who have not yet accepted `normal' professional behaviours."

Along with her colleagues, Assoc Prof Rogers urged students to ignore the advances
of pharmaceutical companies.

"Both the ethical arguments and the limited available empirical evidence lead to the
conclusion that the best policy is for medical students to have no contact with drug companies,"

she said.

National Health and Medical Research Council ethics committee chair Dr Kerry Breen
echoed the sentiment, saying it should also extend to practicing doctors.

"The pharmaceutical industry has learnt to influence our prescribing behaviour indirectly,"

Dr Breen said.

"My criticism is of the naivete of doctors and or their unwillingness to accept overwhelming
evidence that the techniques used by the industry to increase prescribing of their products
actually work.

"Most doctors seem to genuinely perceive they are immune to such influences."

Doctors should refuse to see pharmaceutical industry sales representatives and institutions
should wean themselves off drug company funding, Dr Breen said.

AAP kbw/drp/bwl

KEYWORD: PRESCRIBE

2004 AAP Information Services Pty Limited (AAP) or its Licensors.