Healthy Skepticism Library item: 20486

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Norington B
Why a company offered doctors fun and Games
The Sydney Morning Herald 1988 May 4

Full text:

A drug company is expected to be reprimanded today by its trade association and told to cancel a promotion which offers doctors a free trip to the Seoul Olympics in return for prescribing their products.

The move by the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association follows criticism of Searle Australia Ltd, which has offered the free trip to promote its anti-diarrhoea drug Lomotil.

The offer has renewed pressure on doctors to reject inducements regularly offered by drug companies – ranging from coffee cups and pens to computers and free trips abroad under the guise of seminars. (See illustration, left, which shows the annual haul of an average doctor contacted yesterday by the Herald).

The Consumers Association has called for Searle to withdraw its promotion and publicly apologise to doctors.

It is believed that thousands of doctors declared that they prescribed the drug to their patients as part of the promotion. This was the prerequisite for entering the “competition” for the $6000 trip.

The entry coupon, published in two medical journals, asked the doctor to state: “I am a Lomotil prescriber (we’ll take your word for it) and would like to enter your ‘Lomotil Summer Olympics’ competition”. The president of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, Dr Eric Fisher, said yesterday that such gimmicks were not in the interests of patients and posed a threat to medical standards.

Doctors were being ‘conditioned’ to accept many such inducements by companies which sought to promote their prescription drugs, he said.

They were frequently sent samples of drugs and desktop gifts as a means for company salesman to later entice prescription of certain products.

Drug companies were prepared to “fly groups of doctors all over Australia to promote a drug”.

The prescription of the Doctors’ Reform Society, Dr Robert Marr, said drugs should be prescribed on the basis of patient needs.

The inducement system had arisen because there was no guiding body to inform doctors about what they should prescribe.

It would greatly assist many doctors if the Federal Government publication Australian Prescriber were to be published monthly instead of quarterly.

Another doctor from the society, Dr Brian Learoyd, said he found even small inducements or gimmicks “mildly offensive” while a free trip was “quite corrupt”.

Dr John Hirshman said: “In effect, the prize of a free trip for prescribing Lomotil is a bribe which has little to do with the merits of the product”. He urged that the promotion be cancelled.