Uwe Reinhardt, who teaches health policy at Princeton and is anything but “shy,” has written that he himself would not have the wherewithal to do it.

Pharma marketing motto: First give, and then take. It’s not so much pens and papers, per se, but samples are the number one influencer of prescribing habits, clearly. But there a number of other ‘gifting’ methods used by the pharma industry that are not quite as visibile to the patients in particular or as impactful to coerce obligation from a prescriber such as a pen with the name of a med on it, for example. Consulting arrangements, TVs for doctors’ offices, etc. Seeding trials. Comparatively speaking, pharma industry items such as pen or paper appear rather mild compared with other tacit inducements implemented often by the pharma industry intended to ‘partner’ thier organization with the physician, which does not always have the patients’ interests entirely in mind when implementing such marketing tactics and clearly the patients are largely unaware of such inducements given to and accepted by thier doctors on a regular basis.

but you already have it much of it posted. Fabulous.