How drug companies keep tabs on physicians: “Doctors have long maintained that they are immune to the blandishments of drug companies. The lucrative consulting contracts, fancy meals, trips to exotic locales, free pens, flashlights, coffee mugs, and sticky notepads emblazoned with prescription-drug brand names—none of these are supposed to cloud a physician’s clinical judgment. Doctors like to think they decide which treatments to order and which drugs to prescribe because of scientific evidence, not marketing.

But the companies think they know otherwise. Last week, five whistle-blowers from government and industry gathered in Washington, D.C., at a meeting sponsored by the online scientific journal PLoS and the Government Accountability Project to discuss the pharmaceutical industry. Among the attendees were Kathleen Slattery-Moschkau, a former drug company representative and independent filmmaker, and an unnamed drug company researcher. They detailed for the group how the companies and the reps know—right down to the pill—whether or not their sales pitches are working and how to improve them. The industry’s semi-secret weapon is prescriber reports, weekly lists of every prescription written by each of the 600,000 doctors in the United States. Relatively few physicians know about prescriber reports, also known as prescriber profiles. But their existence makes it far more difficult to imagine that pharmaceutical marketing has no effect on the doctors it targets.” (Slate)