My lede:

Pharmaceutical promotion through drug rep visits, medical journal advertisements and company-sponsored meetings rarely results in higher-quality prescribing, according to a systematic review published in the October PLoS Medicine.

“The big news here is that many physicians deny that they are influenced by information from pharmaceutical companies, and yet we found many studies where there was an association between promotion and the physician’s prescribing,” said Dr. Geoffrey Spurling, senior lecturer at the University of Queensland School of Medicine in Brisbane, Australia. “Physicians need to realize that they are not invulnerable to persuasion techniques.”

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