The easiest route for a pill to take from the manufacturer to the patient may be through gifts and sample medicines that doctors receive from pharmaceutical companies. A New England Journal of Medicine www.nejm.org study http://freeinternetpress.com/story.php?sid=11542 revealed some types of relationships between the doctors and the drug industry from the 94% of the physicians who responded to the survey.

Physicians admitted to getting meals from company representatives (83%), free drug samples (78%), reimbursements for the costs of attending educational conferences hosted by drug companies (35%), fees for consulting, speaking engagements and enrolling patients in clinical trials (28%), tickets to cultural and sporting events (7%), and so on. You can read Joseph Pereira's article, Gifts to Doctors Are Widespread at www.wsj.com.

Paxil’s maker, GlaxoSmithKline, has been one of the pharmaceutical companies promoting its place with depression patients. Would you expect a doctor having close ties with drug manufacturers to be sensitive toward side effects and to look into them before prescribing? Of course, you would, and you would hope for objectivity. But did you know that the pharmaceutical industry itself estimates that it spends about five billion, seven hundred million dollars ($5,700,000,000.00) every year on marketing directly to physicians? That an average of $6,000 to $7,000 per doctor, so you know some are getting much more. www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/22/AR2005072202220.html

What about your doctor? Almost all doctors are of course conscientious and have your best interests at heart. But you should know about the role marketing may play in your health care provider’s choice of medications to treat you. They may have side effects that a pregnant woman, for example, would want to know about before they affected her baby.