It isn’t short, but this is a fascinating explanation of how drug reps influence doctors - and patient care. Read it for self-defense, because this is the logical outcome of a profit-based healthcare system:

As the figure of the traditional doctor fades away, it is being replaced by a figure akin to the drug rep, one whose responsibilities are to compete as vigorously as possible in the medical marketplace. Patients are being replaced by “health-care consumers,” who shop for the best medical bargains they can find. If it is true that the drug rep does not put my interests first, the same is true of everyone else in the marketplace; and we believe that such problems in the marketplace will be sorted out by the invisible hand. Buyers will stop buying from sellers who provide them with inferior goods. This model of medicine is not unlike that advocated thirty years ago by Robert Sade, a surgeon at my old medical school, the Medical University of South Carolina. Writing in The New England Journal of Medicine, Sade argued, “Medical care is neither a right nor a privilege: it is a service provided by doctors and others to people who wish to purchase it.” He is now the vice chair of the AMA’s Council of Ethical and Judicial Affairs.

Many doctors seem resigned to this shift. They see themselves as a beleaguered group whose lives are made miserable by third-party payers, personal-injury attorneys, and hospital bureaucrats. Whatever idealism they may have had about the practice of medicine is being pushed aside by the concrete realities of hustling in the new medical marketplace. Many academic physicians seem cowed by the power of the drug companies, upon whom some depend for research funding. For some, it’s not so much a question of whether medicine has become a business as what kind of business it has become. When I talked recently to a gastroenterologist at an Ivy League medical school about his work as a thought leader for a variety of drug companies, he shrugged and said, “Better a whore than a concubine.”