I don't know about you, but my practice runs on pens, and I can't seem to keep a pen for more than a few minutes. I am not sure what happens to my pens. They must jump from my pocket or I must just set them down without noticing. To keep my practice going, I count on a fresh supply of pens from my local drug reps. But now some folks are calling on a ban to cut off my supply of pens.

In a recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, experts warned that the financial ties between physicians and drug and device vendors are undermining scientific integrity and patient care. They went so far as to say that even accepting a pen as a gift was wrong. A total ban on contact between pharmaceutical reps and doctors would seem to be their goal.

This makes me wonder how doctors would learn about new drugs. I, for one, use my local drug reps as sources of information. And no, I am not a wide-eyed farm boy from the Northwest who is awed by fast-talking city folk.

I ask the drug reps about problems with their competitors' drugs. I ask for the half-life of a drug so that I can better understand my dosing patterns. I ask when the drug will come off protected patent status. I ask for the cost of the drug, and sometimes I ask for access to information about the phase two testing of the drug.

I tried to see if I could find this information in my Physicians' Desk Reference. First, I spent several minutes adjusting the squint of my eyes so I could read the tiny type of my PDR. I searched and found what I thought was the info on my target drug. Then I noticed I was reading about another drug. The info I was seeking started at the bottom right corner of the prior page. I could not find the half-life, price or patent status.

After that, I had a bad case of the blind staggers from trying to read the fine print, my chronic rotator cuff tendonitis kicked in when I lifted the heavy book, and my smoldering tennis elbow flared to life when I put the book back into place on a top shelf.

The issue of banning drug-rep-related pens aside, I find it interesting that there are many full-page ads for drugs in JAMA and most medical publications. In fact, most of the anti-pharmaceutical rep articles I have read are flanked front and back by pages of ads for drugs.

The pharmaceutical industry has a large budget for marketing and will spend that money on TV ads and other media if they don't spend it on sending reps into doctors' offices. If an office ban were put in place, then to be free of pharmaceutical industry influence, the academics promoting this cause would have to stop watching TV, reading magazines and using the Internet.

I don't find the rep visits intrusive. It would be a mistake to ban visits from drug reps, just as it would be a mistake to ban advertising from the same group in our medical magazines. If this were to happen, I do not know how I would get information on new drugs.

Yes, there have been some abuses in the past, but let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Accepting a pen should not be a crime. In the meantime, if you have seen any of my local reps, tell them to stop by. I am running low on pens again.