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Is Your Doctor a Dealer for the Drug Companies?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/opinion/02mon2.html
THE NEW YORK TIMES
July 2, 2007
Editorial

Is Your Doctor Tied to Drug Makers?

It's no surprise that the pharmaceutical industry is appalled at proposals
to set up a national registry of its gifts and payments to doctors. Too much
information might lead patients to suspect that their doctors are choosing
costly medicines out of gratitude to the manufacturers rather than for the
best medical or economic interests of their patients.

The drug companies ply doctors with a wide range of gifts, everything from
free lunches for busy doctors and their staffs while sales representatives
extol the virtues of their latest drugs to subsidized trips to vacation
spots for conferences billed as educational events. The companies also pay
large sums to doctors for consulting or for conducting research. These
payments, which can mount into the hundreds of thousands of dollars over a
period of years, look suspiciously like inducements to promote or prescribe
the companies' drugs.

Although medical societies and the industry's trade association have adopted
voluntary guidelines that are supposed to limit payments and gifts to modest
proportions, they typically still allow doctors to be paid as consultants or
speakers, leaving plenty of room to lavish favors upon them. As Gardiner
Harris reported in The Times last week, one drug company invited doctors to
a weekend training session in Orlando, Fla., to learn how to give marketing
lectures to other doctors for an asthma medicine. The enticement was free
airfare, a rental car and hotel room, plus a $2,700 stipend.

Several states have tried to rein in abuses by requiring some form of
disclosure, but every state law has defects, most notably a failure to make
doctor-specific data readily available to the public. Last week Senator Herb
Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat who is chairman of the Special Committee on
Aging, and Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, said they would
push for a national registry that would force drug and medical device
companies to report their gifts and payments to physicians.

The legislation ought to require electronic reporting of all payments to
individual doctors for posting in a registry that could be easily searched
from home computers. If there is nothing wrong with such payments, neither
the doctors nor the industry should object to public disclosure.