corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14481

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

Jack A.
GSK to publish level of advisory fees for doctors
Financial Times 2008 Oct 23
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/29ad8ecc-a099-11dd-80a0-000077b07658.html


Full text:

GlaxoSmithKline is to make public the level of advisory fees it offers to doctors and medical academics, and will strictly cap the payments they can receive in the US to $150,000 (£88,000) a year each.

Andrew Witty, chief executive of the UK-based pharmaceutical company, said he was introducing tougher new rules to impose a cap “without exception” on such payments and promised to publish the amounts.

His commitment comes at a time of growing concern that the widespread practice of payments by pharmaceutical companies may help unfairly influence “key opinion leaders” in the medical community, in a way that biases their judgments and recommendations for particular treatments.

GSK has recently been drawn into the debate in the US, after reports that Charles Nemeroff, chairman of the psychiatry department at Emory university in Atlanta, had received nearly $1m in fees from the company during 2000-06, most of which it is claimed he had not disclosed. He has recently stepped down from his post pending the outcome of an internal inquiry.

In Europe, the Dutch Health Inspectorate is investigating concerns about payments from GSK to academics who sit on the Health Council, an advisory body that recommended the use of Cervarix, the company’s recently launched drug to protect against cervical cancer. GSK said it had received “no allegations of misconduct”.

The cases have added support to a proposal from Senator Charles Grassley in the US to introduce “sunshine” legislation designed to require publication of fees paid to doctors, although the fate of his bill remains unclear.

“It’s appropriate that we have a limit on what we pay,” said Mr Witty. “In the past, whatever has happened has happened, but in the future there will be strict adherence to these caps, which will be clearer to everybody.” The company added that the “timing and infrastructure” of publishing details of its payments had yet to be determined.

The US National Institutes of Health, a large funder of academic research, as well as leading academic medical journals, have requirements for disclosure of conflicts of interests through both advisory fees to academics and broader support to their universities and institutions.

However, such disclosures are difficult to police and public registers of payments would make it far easier to identify any discrepancies.

The pharmaceutical industry has taken steps in recent years to limit accusations of influencing doctors, curbing lavish entertainment and luxury travel under the pretext of supporting their attendance at academic conferences. But critics continue to question payments to individual doctors as speakers and advisers to companies, as well as the drug industry’s heavy sponsorship of continuing professional medical education.

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909