Pharmaceutical companies frequently pay doctors, and research indicates that these payments have an impact on doctors’ prescription practices. Expressly, doctors may prescribe more expensive name-brand medications over low-cost medications, as well as more payer-company pharmaceuticals. How do these physicians receive “payments” from these companies?
The practice of providing everything from computers to expensive medical textbooks, seminar speaking fees, research funding, lavish trips, meals, and other incentives was supposed to have been capped at about $25 years ago. Now, research has uncovered a most disturbing place where this practice can have an enormous influence on the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric disorders, and it relates to their holy book,