By GottaLaff
My dad is a (now retired) doctor, and he used to bring home all kinds of pharmaceutical toys: We got free rulers, pads of paper, pens, even posable human forms that I used as models for drawings (I was an art major).
Well, those days are over for kids and parental MDs everywhere:
Starting Jan. 1, the pharmaceutical industry has agreed to a voluntary moratorium on the kind of branded goodies — Viagra pens, Zoloft soap dispensers, Lipitor mugs — that were meant to foster good will and, some would say, encourage doctors to prescribe more of the drugs.
I'll have you know that my dad was not in the least influenced. He was one of those really good doctors you only see in old movies and dream of when you're dying of the flu. He also made house calls, just in case you think I'm exaggerating.
No longer will Merck furnish doctors with purplish adhesive bandages advertising Gardasil, a vaccine against the human papillomavirus. Banished, too, are black T-shirts from Allergan adorned with rhinestones that spell out B-O-T-O-X. So are pens advertising the Sepracor sleep drug Lunesta, in whose barrel floats the brand’s mascot, a somnolent moth.
Some skeptics deride the voluntary ban as a superficial measure that does nothing to curb the far larger amounts drug companies spend each year on various other efforts to influence physicians. But proponents welcome it as a step toward ending the barrage of drug brands and logos that surround, and may subliminally influence, doctors and patients.
I still have my old Pfizer ruler. I'm sure of it.
The new voluntary industry guidelines [...] bar drug companies from giving doctors branded pens, staplers, flash drives, paperweights, calculators and the like.
Nooo! Not "the like"! Anything but "the like"!
The guidelines also reiterate the group’s 2002 code, which prohibited more expensive goods and services like tickets to professional sports games and junkets to resorts. And it asks companies that finance medical courses, conferences or scholarships to leave the selection of study material and scholarship recipients to outside program coordinators.
I can promise you right here and now that my dad was never influenced by a paper weight. A stapler, maybe.... but a paper weight? Don't be ridiculous.
The guidelines, for example, still permit drug makers to underwrite free lunches for doctors and their staffs or to sponsor dinners for doctors at restaurants, as long as the meals are accompanied by educational presentations. [...]
The industry code also permits drug makers to pay doctors as consultants “based on fair market value” — which critics say means that companies can continue to pay individual doctors tens of thousands of dollars or more a year. [...]About 40 drug makers, including Eli Lily & Company, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer, have signed on to the code. [...]
The restrictions come as a blow to the makers and distributors of promotional products, an industry with an annual turnover of about $19 billion, according to Promotional Products Association International, a trade group. Such companies, accustomed to orders of up to a million pens a drug, stand to lose around $1 billion a year in sales as a result of the drug industry’s voluntary ban, the group said.
Of course, there's always that one doctor who goes overboard:
Dr. Jeffrey F. Caren, a cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, has collected more than 1,200 pens and mounted them on a pillar in his office.
Some doctors are a little offended by the guidelines. After all, would you ever let a vaginal-med-pen get the better of you?
Dr. Hurson said she paid no attention to the logos on the pens she carries around in her doctor’s coat. Prompted by a reporter’s question, she pulled out a handful of pens from her pocket and read off the drugs advertised: Clindesse, a cream for vaginal infection; Halo, a system for detecting breast cancer, and Evamist, an estrogen spray. “It’s hard for me to believe it influences what you prescribe.”
She can't fool me. I bet many a pharma-sales rep has gotten a rise in sales because of her Viagra roller balls.
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