Sample Medications

It's hard in this age of medicine to know what to do about free samples of medications.

There was once a day when wherever you went you were able to get free samples of the newest medications on the market, and nobody had a real problem with it. Ophthalmologists were certainly no exception to this with entire cabinets full of eye drop samples.

But things have changed. The great exposure of the pharmaceutical industry led many to become more aware of the problems with free samples. Free samples were equated with getting a patient on a branded, new medication for which they would in the future require a prescription and pay a lot of money. Most university health care settings have essentially banned the presence of pharmaceutical representatives from their campuses. Most would agree that this is generally a good thing. But have they really gained anything with the banning? If you figure that most of these patients are uninsured or have at best Medicaid/Medicare, which frequently won't cover the cost of the newer, higher priced medications, then the university wasn't a huge motivation for sales people.

Still, there is another side to it. Essentially all new drugs in their infancy are only available as the expensive brand name due to patents. And sometimes, just sometimes, the new medications is in fact the next best greatest thing.  Unless an unbiased overwhelming amount of literature and data suggest otherwise, I typically don't prescribe these drugs until they've been on the market a few years when more safety data is available. But, again, sometimes the new drug is just too good to not use. And considering many of my patients would never be able to afford such a thing, is it so wrong to continuously give them free samples? You may argue that as long as the company is giving out free samples, the cost of the medication will remain high or even rise. This, I don't think, would hold water when you figure that the overwhelming majority of the company's income goes to profit and advertisement (which they often include in their supposed "R&D" costs), not manufacturing costs. There's good literature on this out there - I recommend you read it.

So I still believe that in moderation, the dispensing of free samples can be helpful to good patient care. So long as there aren't associated kickbacks, awards, and presribers' interests at hand. Now if you want to talk about equipment and instrument representatives, that's an entirely different story.