Money, Meals, and Marketing in Medicine: A 13-Year Follow-Up Survey of Physicians

Pharmaceutical company marketing to physicians is known to impact prescribing patterns. In 2011, we surveyed medical students and residents about physician/industry relationships. In 2024, we resurveyed the same participants to study changes in their behaviors over time and their current opinions of policies regulating interactions between physicians and industry. In both surveys, respondents were asked to report whether they had received gifts or financial support from industry or interacted with pharmaceutical representatives. We also asked which resources they used to learn about drugs. In 2024, we added questions to evaluate conflict of interest policies in patient care institutions. We performed chi-squared tests on reported behaviors in 2011 and 2024. For 2024 questions about policies governing interactions, chi-squared tests evaluated the association between responses and participants' reported receipt of gifts from the pharmaceutical industry. Of the 294 respondents (33% response rate), 283 participants remained available for analysis after meeting our exclusion criteria. Participants were generally consistent in the magnitude and types of gifts they reported in 2011 and 2024. By contrast, there were important changes in their use of resources to learn about drugs. About one in four physicians did not know whether their institutions had policies governing interactions with the pharmaceutical industry, though respondents expressed support for meaningful limits on such relationships.