Can doctors stay informed about novel medicines without the help of pharmaceutical representatives and their materials?
For medical students and younger doctors, drug representatives are seen as a convenient and even essential source of information about the overwhelming number of drugs on the market. However, information provided by these “sources of information” is often biased towards the sponsor, minimising negative aspects of the drug, and often uses selling points that do not relate to clinically relevant, patient oriented data. Take, as an example the 78 drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2002. Only 17 of these contained new active ingredients, and the FDA classified seven as improvements to older drugs. So, most of these 78 drugs had little to offer clinicians or their patients above and beyond the current drug choices, but the drug companies had to find “selling points” for all 78 to convince doctors that these new, expensive medicines had compelling advantages. Junior doctors and medical students are often quoted erroneous and clinically insignificant, unsubstantiated cla
