Beginning January 1, 2007, the Henry Ford Health System will not allow its doctors to accept free lunches, gifts, and other perks from pharmaceutical representatives. It also will require drug and medical equipment company representatives to be certified by Ford.

Experts at the University of Michigan Health system, which adopted similar guidelines in 2002, say there are clear benefits for patients. These benefits include safer drugs and lower costs. They believe drugs will be safer when physicians don’t accept gifts because free samples often were expired or were not stored properly. Also, doctors who follow the “no-gift” policy tend to prescribe more generic drugs. At U-M, generic drug use has increased from 45% to 58%.

Gifts are very common in the medical field. Drug company promotional expenses for 2002 were estimated at about $21 billion a year, with $6.6 billion of that being used for doctor and hospital gifts and expenses. In one notable example, Dr. Joseph Oesterling, the former chief urologist at U-M convinced the health system’s formulary to prescribe drugs from a company that gave him several million dollars for research. Oesterling resigned in 1997, briefly lost his license and served a short term of community service for his unethical behavior.