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Volume 356:1697-1700 April 26, 2007 Number 17 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

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Years ago, an administrator at a community hospital explained to me how well his institution's grand-rounds program worked. "The drug companies find the speakers, pay their honoraria, and provide free food for the doctors, which helps a lot with attendance," he said. "It works well for us, especially with our budgets so tight." Yet those lunches were actually quite costly for the hospital: attendees at such events predictably go on to prescribe the products promoted there — which is precisely why the drug companies so willingly pay for these programs.

This penetration of commerce into the province of science isn't . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Source Information

Dr. Avorn is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women's Hospital — both in Boston.

An interview with Dr. Avorn and Dr. Mark McClellan can be heard at www.nejm.org.

This article (10.1056/NEJMp078041) was published at www.nejm.org on April 13, 2007.

This article has been cited by other articles:

• Kesselheim, A. S., Avorn, J. (2008). Pharmaceutical Promotion to Physicians and First Amendment Rights. NEJM 358: 1727-1732 [Full Text]