Take home food from expensive restaurants. Delivery of lunches to physicians offices. Underwriting dinners at ethnic celebrations and ethnic national holidays. After the chat the doctor picks up a few flats of flowering plants for his home. Some of the ads are so outrageous that prestigious journals like the Annals of internal Medicine and the American medical Journal termed them either misleading or blatantly fraudulent.
Most doctors claim that they accept favors from drug companies without any preconditions.
It is hard to believe that after receiving an expensive vacation one would not in any way feel obligated to the host. In a 19996 thought provoking commentary in the prestigious British medical journal Lancet, Sidney Wolfe of the Public Citizen s Health research Group points out the innovative ways the pharmaceutical industry influences physicians. Their advertisements are now directed towards hippocampus, a small tiny part of the brain that processes information by connecting parts of the brain where gut instincts are formed. Until now we only knew that abnormalities of hippocampus were associated with posttraumatic syndrome and schizophrenia. According to Wolfe, the now innovative ads instead of selling pharmaceutical products to the doctors, now sell doctors to the pharmaceutical companies.