Some of those meals were bought for doctors who work as consultants for Pfizer or who moonlight as speakers for the company’s products. But other meals were purchased for doctors who did no work for Pfizer but simply listened to a talk about a product or disease during the meal.
Pfizer also includes in its total some meals purchased for nurse practitioners and physician assistants, who, like doctors, can prescribe drugs.
Pfizer reported spending as little as $10 on some doctors, and hundreds of dollars for others, and in a few cases, several thousands dollars.
Pfizer spent $3,266 last year on meals for Dr. Stanley Nasraway, director of the surgical intensive care unit at Tufts Medical Center - more than any other Massachusetts doctor. A hospital spokeswoman said that Nasraway gave 64 out-of-state talks for Pfizer, many of which were at dinnertime and involved a restaurant meal costing about $50.
The amount companies spend on meals is relatively small when compared with direct payments made to doctors for speaking and consulting. Nasraway, for example, earned $150,900 speaking for Pfizer last year. But it falls in an area that is the target of growing restrictions by regulators and at some academic medical centers and medical schools because of past abuses. Those involved drug companies paying for lavish steak and lobster dinners for physicians, sometimes at seaside resorts, to encourage them to prescribe their products.
The Boston Globe and ProPublica, a nonprofit online investigative journalism organization, recently analyzed payments posted on the websites of 12 drug makers. The analysis found that payments to doctors in Massachusetts for promoting a company’s drugs in speeches to colleagues appear to be falling.
It is impossible to compare spending on recent meals to prior years because companies have just started reporting that level of detail. Only two other companies disclosed spending on meals for all of 2010 - Cephalon, which spent about $18,000 in Massachusetts, and Johnson & Johnson, which spent about $3,000.
