Episode Information
The pharmaceutical industry spends nearly 11 billion dollars a year marketing their products to doctors. Reformers worry that this is eroding professionalism and ethical standards within the medical profession—and that patients can no longer trust their doctors to make decisions based on good evidence. Connecticut lawmakers are considering legislation that would ban gifts to doctors and the mining of medical data—policies that follow in the footsteps of states like Minnesota and Vermont. Meanwhile, the federal government considers requiring pharmaceutical companies to report all of their payments to doctors to a publicly accessible central, online, database. Some doctors and pharmaceutical companies argue that increased regulation makes for a hostile business environment and disregards the importance of internal ethics codes. Join the conversation about conflicts of interest in medicine—should patients know who is taking their doctors out to lunch?
Email from Dr. Howard Rogers
Regarding WWL Gifts to Doctors--Ethics or Information?
Howard Rogers MD
Norwich CT
listener tweet
Guy is lying. Friend who is a pharm rep. gives me the low-down: dinners still commonplace, 'code of conduct' barely enforced.
listener Tweet, you should
listener Tweet, you should turn in your friend because he is breaking the Pharma guidelines if he/she is taking doctors out to dinner that is not an eduational event with a MD doing the education.
Tweet from J Smith
This conversation would still make sense if you substituted "Drug Rep" with "Lobbyist" and "Doctor" with "Senator".
Listener email from Doug
Many reps and former pharma reps will tell you that Dr's depend on their services to keep current-is this true and does it skew the Dr's selection in favor of the most expensive drugs.
listener email from David
Let’s not throw out the baby with the bath. If you restrict the ability to pay honoraria to qualified speakers, you stifle the exchange of information at professional meetings. I am part of a professional organization that in the past had covered conference registration and travel expenses fro FDA speakers. Because of extraordinary regulations, it is now almost impossible to get FDA speakers to come to these meetings. The valuable flow of regulatory information has been seriously suppressed by these regulations.
Listener email from Weston
Could someone please point out that the "lunches" are supposedly to educate the doctors in their free time. Staying current is an administrative cost -- not something that is done in "free time." You cannot expect to get full attention and thoughtfulness from the doctors and other staff while they are both learning and eating -- it leaves them with a good feeling -- and a bias toward the meds.
Listener email from Laura
I work for a small biotech company dealing with oncology products. I am not allowed to even leave a pen behind for a physician or nurse, let alone a gift of any kind, for fear of seeming to try to unduly influence physicians. I don't know what year Blumenthal is referring to, but the trips, junkets and gifts he is speaking of have been long forbidden in my world. On the other side, I have had conversations with doctors about the best way to reduce drug side effects for the cancer patient by subtle nuances in how to administer my drugs - these conversations have taken place over a modest lunch of a slice of pizza and have resulted in cancer patients being able to tolerate their chemotherapy instead of having to come off their treatment. These are doctors that I see actually running down the halls in the hospital because they are so busy. That doctor doesn't have enough hours in the day to read every article about every medicine.
Thanks and a slice of people
Thank you so much for addressing this topic. I'm pretty tired of the "slice of pizza" argument, sometimes knowns as the "slice of pizza or a sub" argument. As your reputable guests explained, the amount of money spent by Big Pharma to market to doctors is inarguably documented. I don't know where Iconn buys her pizza, but 11 billion dollars makes for a lot of pizza.
I also find it ironic that Big Pharma seems oppose any additional legal regulation but they seem to have no issue with lobbying state governments to mandate the prescribing of mental health drugs to school school children, and vaccines with serious adverse reactions to teenage girls.
Paul R. Pescatello didn't speak to one specific fact during today's discussion, he merely dismissed each well documented item with a smug "that's just not true." How does a guy like that sleep at night?
Just so we're all on the same page: one of the most corrupt and ethically devoid industries in this country, regulated by perhaps the most ethically devoid of all federal agencies (the FDA), opposes this legislation and instead wants to "self regulate" itself. Do we even need to debate this?