It usually begins in medical school.
Students receive drug company pens, and clocks, and coffee mugs.
You deserve to go out to a particularly nice place, to a nice conference. It is all part of an intense marketing effort. Each drug company tries to convince doctors of the benefits of its medications, so the doctors, in turn, might prescribe them to you. Drug companies now employ 70,000 sales representatives, which means one sales representative for every nine doctors. It's creating incentives that may change the way doctors practice medicine and why they prescribe certain medications.