Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16633

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: Journal Article

Tuffs A
Leading German doctors criticise rising use of post-marketing observational studies by drug companies
BMJ 2009 Oct 13; 339:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/339/oct13_2/b4199

Abstract:

Tens of thousands of German patients treated by GPs or in specialist practices are involved in observational studies paid for by the drug industry without ever having given their consent. The companies pay doctors as much as 1000 (£925; $1475) a patient for prescribing a drug and documenting its effects. Critics say this is just a way to push new and expensive drugs that have few innovative qualities onto the market.

Carl-Heinz Müller, a GP and one of the directors of the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians (Kassenärztliche Bundesvereinigung (KBV)), said in an interview published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 1 October 2009 that the practice was “immoral.” Karl Lauterbach, a health spokesman for the Social Democratic party, said that such studies are a “legal form of corruption.” But the German Association of Research Based Pharmaceutical Companies said that observastional studies are needed to find out unknown . . .