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You're the doctor!

The Los Angeles Times reports on a new study that appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association:

In an unusual experiment in which actresses posed as patients, doctors were five times more likely to write them prescriptions after the patients inquired about a specific antidepressant, Paxil. The actresses pretended to have a mild form of depression, a condition that does not require antidepressants...

"When patients ask for a drug, they tend to get a drug regardless of whether it is appropriate for them," said Joel Weissman, a health policy expert at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the research.

A few years ago, after seeing a GP who recommended numerous drugs to me that I had no immediate need for, I started collecting prescriptions (with no intention of ever filling them). I think I got four from that doctor and three from the specialist he referred me to. A year later, I had stash of 10-12; if I kept at it, I thought it would make a nice art project, but then I realized that I'm not an artist, and didn't want to keep seeing sheep for doctors.