UConn Prescription: No Freebies: Doctors, Medical Students Urge Committee To Ban Gifts From Drug Companies

By William Hathaway, The Hartford Courant, Conn.

Oct. 25–The University of Connecticut Health Center is debating whether to become a no-pizza zone for pharmaceutical sales reps.

Spurred by a national student-led campaign to ban drug company freebies, Health Center officials Wednesday updated doctors and medical students on a committee’s work to create uniform policies on accepting gifts, fees and educational reimbursement from drug company marketers.

Students and some doctors who crammed into a small meeting room at the Farmington campus, in turn, urged officials to completely ban such gifts.

The cornucopia of free lunches, drug samples, and educational seminars given to doctors are nothing more than bribes to prescribing doctors, argued representatives of the American Medical Student Association. And those marketing practices lead physicians to prescribe drugs that might not be in the best interest of patients either medically or financially.

“It’s time to change the culture of medicine,” said Nitin Roper, a second year medical student at UConn.

Anthony Fleg, coordinator of the student association’s national “PharmFree” campaign, called for “an end to medicine’s addiction to drug company benefits.”

Medical schools such as Stanford, Yale, University of California-Davis, and Michigan have already adopted such bans, Fleg said.

The AMSA is also lobbying Congress to require the disclosure of all payments to doctors by pharmaceutical companies.

UConn committee members are working to adopt consistent rules for all people who work at the Health Center.

Currently, all state employees are prohibited from receiving any gifts valued at more than $50 within a year. Residents completing their training at UConn are prohibited from accepting any gifts at all.

However, medical students and community doctors who are not state employees but work or teach at the Health Center are not subject to such restrictions.

Also under consideration by the committee are rules that would ban drug company representatives from many patient areas of the Health Center.

The completion of the initial draft of new policies are probably several months away, said Dr. Bruce Koeppen, dean for academic affairs.

Contact William Hathaway at whathaway@courant.com

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