From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
… Doctors who allow a pharmaceutical rep to treat their office staff to lunch no doubt don’t think of themselves as being subtly corrupted, no more than an old straight-shooting reporter with his bottle of scotch did back in the day. But experience teaches that such chumminess is a problem in any profession. In the case of doctors, research shows that gifts do influence how doctors treat patients and conduct research…
That is the gloomy conclusion of a study — published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association– by two researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. The researchers were Sunita Sah, a former practicing physician who once consulted for pharmaceutical companies, and George Loewenstein, the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Economics and Psychology…
The study found that reminding physicians first of their medical training burdens more than doubled the percentage of those willing to accept gifts — from 21.7 percent to 47.5 percent. Suggesting the idea that their sacrifices might justify the acceptance of gifts — in effect inviting them to rationalize such behavior — increased the portion of those willing to take the gifts to 60.3 percent…
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