Arabian nights-1001 tales of how pharmaceutical companies cater to the material needs of doctors: case report.
OBJECTIVE
To describe how pharmaceutical companies cater to the material needs of doctors.


METHODS
Case report of memoirs.


METHODS
Facilities that have nothing to do with medicine, somewhere in the Arabian peninsula.


METHODS
Random sample of doctors.


METHODS
Promotion by the pharmaceutical industry.


METHODS
Short term outcomes were travel, pleasure, amusement, and gifts, and long term outcomes were the market share of specific companies.


RESULTS
Short term outcomes were heterogeneous, underlying the diversity of the means employed by the pharmaceutical industry to subvert, divert, and influence medical practice. Overall, 200 doctors were dressed in white gowns, a doctor in preventive medicine quoted Hippocrates in favour of smoking, a senior doctor became a poet, a doctor trying to understand the Methods section of a poster paper wondered whether he should have been sunbathing at the beach instead, and two women doctors were kidnapped by Bedouin warriors. Long term outcomes on the sales of the company drugs are pending but are likely to be most favourable.


CONCLUSIONS
Eat, drink, be merry, and boost prescriptions.
Giannakakis
I A
IA
Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology, University of Ioannina School of Medicine, Ioannina 45110, Greece. jioannid@cc.uio.gr
Ioannidis
J P
JP
D004345:Drug Industry; D005194:Family Practice; D006801:Humans; D007400:Interprofessional Relations; D008389:Marketing of Health Services; D014925:Wit and Humor as Topic