Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16688

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

Hopkins Tanne J
Merck discloses $3.7m paid to US doctors for speeches over three months
BMJ 2009 Oct 26; 339:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/339/oct26_1/b4409

Abstract:

Merck listed $3.7m in payments to US medical experts for speaking on behalf of the company or its products between 1 July and 30 September of this year. It followed Eli Lilly in disclosing payments to doctors who speak for companies.

Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline have promised to make similar disclosures, according to the Associated Press news agency (www.ap.org, 19 Oct 2009, “Merck starts revealing payments to doctor-speakers”).

The list on Merck’s website discloses payments to 1078 doctors and other experts who took part in Merck speaking engagements during July-September. The list includes the names of the individuals, the number of events at which they spoke, the payments they received, and the general topics on which they spoke (such as “diabetes,” “HPV,” or “respiratory”).

Merck said in a press statement: “On average, speakers participated in two programmes each with the average payment totaling $1548 per programme.”

Merck said that . . .

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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