The pharmaceutical gift ban is garnering more support from health care providers across the state. Four prominent Massachusetts physicians wrote to Governor Patrick, Speaker DiMasi and Senate President Murray in support of legislation that would prohibit pharmaceutical companies from giving gifts to health care providers, as did the National Physician’s Alliance and the Boston University and Tufts University chapters of the American Medical Student Association, which together represent 970 practicing and future Massachusetts physicians. (you can read the letters here)

Two former editors-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine (Dr. Marcia Angell, now of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Jerome Kassirer, now of Tufts Medical School) joined with Dr. David Coleman, Chief of Medicine at Boston Medical Center, and Dr. Stephen Tosi, Chief Medical Officer of UMass Memorial Medical Center, to call on the state’s leaders to put an end to the use gifts to market prescription drugs, a practice that undermines patient care, diminishes confidence in the medical profession and increases health care costs. The physicians stressed that “the intellectual aptitude and education required to become a physician do not make physicians any less susceptible to the persuasive power of marketing.”

The National Physician’s Alliance and Boston University and Tufts University chapters of the American Medical Student Association also expressed strong support the pharmaceutical gift ban and academic detailing provisions in the Senate President’s cost control bill. Recognizing the need to eliminate conflicts of interest in patient care, the medical students and national physician group stated that “prescribing decisions must be based on independent scientific evidence, free of inappropriate influences.”
Claribel Vargas