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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 3831

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

Prescription Drugs: Nine States Looking Into Pharmaceutical Company Gifts to Physicians
kaisernetwork.org ( The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation) 2006 Feb 17
http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_index.cfm?DR_ID=35488


Notes:

Ralph Faggotter’s Comments:

A first step towards reducing drug company gifts to doctors is having some transparency in the process.


Full text:

Daily Health Policy Report
Prescription Drugs | Nine States Looking Into Pharmaceutical Company Gifts to Physicians
[Feb 17, 2006]

At least nine states are considering bills that would require pharmaceutical companies to publicly report annual gifts to physicians, hospitals and pharmacists, the USA Today reports. Maine, Minnesota, Vermont, West Virginia and the District of Columbia currently have laws requiring the reporting of gifts. California requires that drug companies declare they are in compliance with federal and industry gift guidelines. Many of the state proposals under consideration this year are modeled after the Vermont law, enacted in 2002, which requires drugmakers to report to the state’s attorney general all gifts of $25 or more given to doctors, hospitals or pharmacists. Aggregate numbers are published but not the names of gift recipients. Some of the state proposals would be more restrictive, such as a Massachusetts bill that would ban all gifts to medical professionals from drugmakers. Massachusetts state Sen. Mark Montigny (D), sponsor of the bill, said, “If a doctor needs a Caribbean vacation or a mug or a pen, he or she is probably not very successful and needs to be in another business.” Montigny added, “The No. 1 thing that keeps government and corporate officials honest is transparency.” Ron Buzzeo, chief regulatory officer for Dendrite International — which advises the pharmaceutical industry — said, “Within a year or two, we may have 20 or 25 states with these restrictions.” The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America says such laws are unnecessary. Marjorie Powell, senior assistant general counsel for PhRMA, said, “All of this is very heavily regulated by the FDA, which controls what companies can say to physicians about their drugs. We don’t think there is a particular need for states to get involved.” Powell and others said that the industry has cut back on large gifts and that visits from sales representatives who bring free lunches to doctors provide an “important educational function,” the USA Today reports (Appleby, USA Today, 2/17).

Gifts Debate Examined
In related news, the Detroit Free Press on Friday examined the debate over whether “the practice of doctors accepting freebies … undermines patient care and should be banned.” A recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that about 90% of the pharmaceutical industry’s marketing budget is directed at doctors. The JAMA article proposed that academic medical centers end the practice of accepting gifts. Pfizer CEO Hank McKinnell on Monday said the JAMA proposal was unnecessary because of a voluntary code of conduct adopted by the drug industry three years ago (Merx, Detroit Free Press, 2/17).

 

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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