Welcoming or wary? Drug reps increasing

Some physicians say pharmaceutical representatives provide them with needed information on new drugs, but other doctors have banned them from their practices.

By Julie Jacob, AMNews staff. April 16, 2001.

They appear in the waiting room, armed with drug samples and stacks of glossy brochures. Often they bring along lunch for the staff or notepads and pens stamped with a drug's name.

They are pharmaceutical company representatives. Their job is to market their company's drugs and persuade physicians to prescribe them. Their ranks are growing rapidly. Their presence is helpful to many doctors, increasingly irksome to others.

About 62,000 pharmaceutical representatives called on physicians in 1999, almost double the number who visited physicians in 1993, according to the most recent data available from Scott-Levin, a pharmaceutical research firm in Newtown, Pa.

The growing number of drug reps is part of the industry's increased emphasis on marketing. Drug company-sponsored events jumped from about 80,000 in 1993 to 280,000 in 1999, according to Scott-Levin data, while the amount of money spent on direct-to-consumer advertising soared from $720 million in 1993 to $1.9 billion in 1999.

Physicians, however, have varied and strong opinions about visits from the swelling ranks of pharmaceutical representatives. Some physicians welcome visits from drug reps. Others are torn between their interest in hearing about new drugs that may help their patients and their concern that the reps promote expensive new drugs that don't offer any real advantage over cheaper, older ones.

Still other physicians have decided to simply shut the door on pharmaceutical representatives altogether and rely solely on medical journals, the Internet and pharmacists for drug information. [...]