Medical School Gift Restriction Policy Affects Prescribing
Physician prescribing behavior appears to be influenced by exposure to pharmaceutical marketing during medical school.
The gift restriction policy of your medical school may have affected your subsequent prescribing behavior, according to the results of a study published in BMJ.
The study found that those physicians studied who went to a medical school with an active restriction against gifts or other forms of pre-professional pharmaceutical marketing were less likely to prescribe 2 out of 3 newly introduced psychotropic medications vs. existing alternative medications.
Researchers looked at the 14 US medical schools that had restriction policies in place by 2004. Prescribing patterns in 2008 and 2009 of physicians attending each school were compared with physicians graduating from the same schools before the policy was implemented, as well as a set of contemporary matched controls. According to the study, none of the newly marketed psychotropic medications “represented radical breakthroughs in their respective classes.”
Read about the results of the study here.
