Under the influence

 Nobody is immune. BD

FOR many Americans, a doctor's decision to prescribe medication is something of a sacred transaction. A physician considers the patient and symptoms and chooses the best drug for the job, drawing upon years of training and clinical experience. It is an exchange conducted in a hushed sanctuary, far from the heat and noise of the marketplace -- a place where cool judgment reigns.
That sanctuary has been breached. Today, drug manufacturers do everything in their considerable power to ensure that their brand-name prescription medications are on the lips of patients and in the minds of physicians every time the two meet across an exam table. A growing chorus of critics says their efforts have begun to rewrite the dialogue between patient and doctor, influence physicians' judgments and open the act of prescribing to forces more profit-minded than sacred.

"There is nothing fundamentally wrong with advertising products," Dr. Jerome P. Kassirer, a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, told a Senate committee recently. "But when financial incentives yield inappropriate or dangerous care, when they inordinately raise the cost of care, when they risk patients' lives in clinical trials, and when they damage the profession, they have gone too far."

Under the influence - Los Angeles Times