Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18488

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

Mamula KB
Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh doctors get millions from drugmakers
Pittsburgh Business Times 2010 July 23
http://pittsburgh.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/stories/2010/07/26/story1.html

Full text:

Four pharmaceutical companies paid at least $3.5 million to Pittsburgh-area doctors and nurse educators in 2009, in large part to teach other health care professionals about medical treatments that could include use of the companies’ products, according to a Pittsburgh Business Times analysis of data filed by the drugmakers.
Such payments have come under increasing criticism from physicians and others within the national medical community, such as Dr. Marcia Angell, a Harvard University lecturer and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, who says the payments are merely “marketing masquerading as education.”
Other critics contend that drug company payments to doctors lead to higher sales of costly drugs without necessarily benefiting patients, or at least give the appearance of impropriety.
But Dr. Anthony Gentile, a gynecologist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, who was paid $89,500 by three of the four drug companies last year, characterized the notion that drug companies could influence doctors’ prescribing practices as “total, unequivocal hogwash.” All but $3,000 paid to Gentile was for conducting presentations to other physicians on behalf of the drug companies, records reveal.

Read more: Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh doctors get millions from drugmakers – Pittsburgh Business Times