Drug Company Gifts Linked to Doctors' Prescribing Habits

Doctors who receive payments or gifts from pharmaceutical companies are more likely to prescribe brand name medications, a new study suggests.

The rate at which doctors prescribed brand name drugs increased with the amount of money or gifts like dinners they received from drug companies, researchers found.

Lead author Dr. James Yeh, of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, said doctors are taught how and what to prescribe during medical school. "

After you leave, sometimes that kind of knowledge is derived from pharmaceutical salespeople," he told Reuters Health.

Along with communications with pharmaceutical salespeople, doctors may also receive meals, subsidies or grants for continuing education and speaking fees from pharmaceutical companies.

Yeh and his colleagues write in JAMA Internal Medicine that some states require doctors to report what they receive from drug companies. In 2013, under the Affordable Care Act, the U.S. created the Open Payments database to collect those reports from across the country.

Read the full report here.