Drug Co. Flattery Wins Docs, Influences Prescriptions : Part of an NPR exposé on a major way in which the pharmaceutical industry gets doctors to whore for it. It was of course obvious to me that the main purpose of funding doctors’ educational talks was to make a profit, but I was surprised (although, after listening to this series, it seems indubitable) that the major impact of enlisting a physician into a “speakers’ bureau” is to influence not the prescribing practices of his or her audiences but that of the speaker h’self.