This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

John M. Westfall, MD, MPH; Jennifer McCabe, MSI; Richard A. Nicholas, MD
Univeristy of Colorado Health Sciences Center Denver

JAMA. 1997;278(19):1569.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

In Reply

—We appreciate the interest in and comments about our recent article describing the personal use of drug samples by physicians and office staff. We are not surprised at the number or variety of responses or by the depth of emotion evoked.

We applaud Dr Margolis' and Dr Rosner's reiteration of the ethical concerns raised in our article. We agree that there is a multitude of ethical dilemmas facing health care. However, as evidenced by the range of letters above, we believe the issues surrounding use of drug samples are important and deserve wide discussion and debate. We appreciate Rosner's broader discussion of other gifts from the pharmaceutical industry and feel this also deserves continued discussion.

Dr Reynolds appears to have misunderstood our calculations. We reported a total of about $10 000 worth of drug samples taken for personal or family use. We attempted to minimize the discussion about dollar values . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?