A consumer advocacy group and a research group at Columbia University have launched a campaign to limit the number of meals and gifts that doctors receive from pharmaceutical companies. What a great idea! Maybe this movement will encourage doctors to prescribe medications based upon empirical studies and not which company bought her an expensive steak dinner last night or is paying for that “educational trip” to Cabo San Lucas in February!
The new initiative, called the Prescription Project, is an outgrowth of an article published in January 2006 in The Journal of the American Medical Association in which a coalition of scholars and doctors proposed that academic medical centers across the country take the lead in restricting interactions between doctors and the health care industry.
Read the New York Times article on the campaign (may require free registration).