Doctors Ditch Drug Samples to Avoid Influencing Treatment

Dec. 1, 2008— -- Who doesn't like freebies, especially when it comes to pricey pills?

But free medication samples, which at first glance look like a win-win-win situation for manufacturers, doctors and patients, can have hidden costs. Doctors might pick a sub-optimal drug simply because they have a sample. Plus, only makers of expensive brand-name drugs are doling out samples. And leaving pharmacists out of the equation might raise the risk of errors.

"Doctors think they're saving their patients money and helping them by giving out free medication," says David Miller, a general internist at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C. Paradoxically, Miller says, "they are likely costing those patients more money down the road."

Recognizing that, health systems around the country are beginning to curtail the practice, a major marketing tool. In January, a study in the journal PLoS Medicine estimated that in 2004, drugmakers handed out free samples to U.S. doctors with a retail value of nearly $16 billion, equal to more than a quarter of their marketing budgets that year.

More than 90 percent of U.S. doctors receive free samples, and more than half of older patients report getting at least one in a given year, Miller and co-authors wrote in September in the Southern Medical Journal. Miller hasn't handed out samples since at least 2000, when his practice moved and lost space to store them.

"It struck us that it was a great natural experiment," Miller says.

Miller and his collaborators looked at whether the loss of the samples closet changed what the internists prescribed. They found that the doctors were three times more likely to prescribe less-expensive generics to uninsured patients after they lost the samples closet.

"There is a perception out in the general public and in the medical community that drug samples are a great way to provide free medication to people who have trouble affording it," Miller says.