Drug lunches are a big feature of life in the office. To clarify, we are not dining on drugs, we are merely being treated by the manufacturers  of drugs - or to be more precise, their representatives. These dapper assertive guys - or more often buxom coquettish women, with a “come hither” manner, are always trying to feed us.

Wednesday is our “drug lunch” day - and we are booked up for months in advance, and reps are constantly clamoring for more days.

Yesterday, the Glaxo-Smith Kline team had fandangled us into an extra lunch on a Thursday on the pretext of bringing us a urologist - to talk to us about Avodart, their newest 5alpha reductase inhibitor for the treatment of prostatic enlargement - with the help of the demonstration “box” - a sort of pretend rectum with four different types of simulated prostate glands within, for you to get a feel of.

Fascinating stuff - that went so well with the bulky ham sandwiches they brought us to dine on.

It is a time honored tradition in medicine to talk about the most unsavory subjects while eating. As medical students, lunch time was the only opportunity we got to talk about the “fascinomas” we’d seen on rounds that morning - however bloody/purulent/fetid/disgusting it was. Even as an established practitioner we retain the ability.  At another drug company sponsored event - dinner this time - as the speaker droned about Zelnorm for irritable bowel, one of the reps produced a glossy folded pamphlet illustrating the ‘Bristol Stool Scale’. Pretty color pictures of stools ranging from “lumps like nuts” to a soupy mess with “no solid pieces”. We took it all in stride - while our flagrantly gay and irreverent Physicians Assistant cracked jokes about “pictures of your children”.

Outlandish or not, I guess our prostatic lunch placed the name and purpose of their product squarely in our consciousness - even if I was a little distracted by one of the drop dead gorgeous women drug reps beside me nonchalantly poking around inside “the box” and distractedly fingering the pretend prostate gland within.

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