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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17560

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

Lam T
PM orders inquiry into US drug-company kickbacks for doctors
Saigon GP Daily 2010 Mar 30
http://www.saigon-gpdaily.com.vn/Health/2010/3/80663/


Full text:

Following reports that the US’s Schering-Plough Pharmaceutical Company incited Ho Chi Minh City doctors to promote two kinds of drugs in exchange for commission, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has ordered the Ministry of Health to impose penalties on the drug company and doctors who took kickbacks.

Ho Chi Minh City doctors receive high commission if they prescribe the drug US’s Schering-Plough Pharmaceutical Company’s Pegintron 50 mdg and Pegintron 80 mcg ( Photo: SGGP)
The Ministry of Health will liaise with the Ho Chi Minh City People’s Committee to investigate the issue and report to the Prime Minister on suggested penalties for those involved.

Doctors in public HCMC hospitals reportedly received up to VND500 million (US$26,300) monthly as commission for promoting two types of Schering-Plough drugs used to treat viral hepatitis.

Leaders of the city’s Medical University and its hospital held a press conference March 29 to discuss the controversy as related to staff here.

Dr. Phan Chien Thang, deputy director of the Medical University Hospital, said that one his staff, Dr. Truong Ba Trung, has been temporarily suspended from his clinical and teaching work for his reported involvement in the case.

In addition, the hospital has terminated a contract with Dr. Dinh Da Ly Huong, also for allegedly taking kickbacks.

Co-deputy Director of the hospital Dr. Nguyen Hoang Bac said he had ordered the facility’s Pharmaceutical Faculty to investigate all drug prescriptions written recently, especially those for Schering-Plough’s Pegintron 50 mdg and Pegintron 80 mcg used to treat liver disease.

It would then be decided if doctors had prescribed the medicines inappropriately to receive commission.

Dr. Le Quan Nghiem, deputy head of the Medical University-turned-head of the Pharmaceutical Faculty, said the school has also suspended Dr. Nguyen Duc Tuan after rumors surfaced that he was working as a marketing director for Schering-Plough.

The US pharmaceutical company merged with US-based Merck Sharp & Dohme (MSD) in 2009 and Ton That Luong Nguyen was appointed chief representative in Vietnam.

Mr. Nguyen reportedly secured a high commission for doctors of 10-30 percent of the cost of the drugs if they prescribed Pegintron 50 mcg and Pegintron 80 mcg for patients.

The monthly turnover in Vietnam of the two types of drugs is around VND6 billion (US$ 315,000). Mr. Nguyen allegedly gained around VND1 billion a month after taking a percentage of the commission made by the doctors.

 

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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