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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18802

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

Staton T
Psychiatrists dominate doc-payment database
Fierce Pharma 2010 Oct 25
http://www.fiercepharma.com/story/psychiatrists-dominate-doc-payment-database/2010-10-25


Full text:

The big doctor-payment database launched last week has coughed up an interesting statistic: There are more psychiatrists collecting payments from the pharma industry than any other type of specialist. And psychiatry was the most common specialty among doctors paid more than $100,000 in consulting or speaking fees.
Of the 384 doctors paid more than $100,000, 116 were psychiatrists. That’s 30 percent. Medscape Medical News theorizes that more psychiatrists are paid pharma consultants because of the high volume of psychotropic drug sales. Last year, antipsychotics alone topped $14.6 billion, with antidepressants at $9.9 billion, IMS Health data shows.
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Adam Linker of the North Carolina Justice Center has a slightly different theory: Psychiatric drugs carry bigger price tags than many other meds. “Some of these drugs are the most expensive,” Linker told WFAE radio. “They’re some of the best-sellers, and they’re driving some of the increases in drug costs. I think drug companies want to keep increasing those prescriptions.”
Psychiatrists themselves say that speaking on behalf of drugmakers doesn’t sway their prescribing habits. The highest-paid psychiatrist on ProPublica’s database, Dr. Roueen Rafeyan, told Medscape that he mostly prescribes generic drugs. “The day I’m influenced by that is the day I’m not fit to practice medicine,” Rafeyan said.

 

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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