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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17475

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

Andrews A
Scrutiny of Doctor-Pharma Ties Leads to Change
ProPublica 2009 Jan 16
http://www.propublica.org/article/scrutiny-of-doctor-pharma-ties-leads-to-change-090116


Full text:

This past weekend, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a slew of articles about dozens of doctors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who have side jobs with drug companies. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) has also trained his eye on UW, where federally mandated disclosure forms don’t require doctors to specify the amount of any industry pay exceeding $20,000.

As a result, patients are often left in the dark about potential conflicts of interest: Fourteen of the 20 doctors interviewed by the Journal Sentinel said they “did not tell patients about their financial relationships with drug companies when they prescribed drugs made by those companies.” And critics say doctors are more likely to prescribe drugs made by companies they take money from, even if there are less expensive ones available or they’re not approved for the problem at hand.

One Journal Sentinel report focused on a UW doctor who conducted a clinical trial for an asthma drug made by Merck, a company from which he has raked in somewhere between $35,000 and $70,000 as a lecturer and consultant. Although the participants in the trial were told about the connection — albeit buried in a consent form and without mentioning either the researcher or company by name — medical professionals say simple disclosure doesn’t negate the conflict of interest.

Another UW doctor was paid between $10,000 and $20,000 by Pfizer to talk up Chantix, its anti-smoking drug. A year ago, that doctor became the medical director of a state-funded program involving treatment for smokers. And, if you’re not familiar with Chantix, it doesn’t exactly have the best track record. In fact, it has one of the worst: For six months, it was associated with more problems than any other prescription drug on the market, according to an October watchdog report. A controversial Chantix trial involving U.S. veterans was also the subject of an ABC News-Washington Times investigation earlier this year. The doctor defended his talks to the Journal Sentinel, noting that another smoking-cessation drug is also associated with serious risks, as is smoking itself.

The dean of UW’s medical school responded to a letter from Grassley by admitting that the school’s disclosure requirements are inadequate and “indefensible.” He promised to update them, telling the Journal Sentinel that the change could be in place by April.

 

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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