Gifts and free dinners from big pharma may influence which drugs your doctor prescribes to treat your health condition, a major review has claimed.
Scientists at the Cochrane Collaboration, an organization widely considered to be the ‘gold standard’ in evidence-based medicine, analyzed data on millions of physicians and other prescribers from 93 studies, 88 percent of which were carried out in the US.
Overall, the researchers found that the drugs doctors prescribed were ‘heavily influenced’ by payments, gifts and free meals from representatives of the pharmaceutical companies that make those medications.
