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Money is the ultimate drug

By Staff | Dec 20, 2013

There’s something sickening about the practice by which pharmaceutical companies pay doctors large amounts of money to recommend certain drugs to their peers.

Sometimes the payments take the form of fees to speak at a conference put on by the pharmaceutical industry. Other times, the money is paid for consulting, research or to pay travel expenses for doctors or hospital staffers to attend one of the conferences put on by drug companies. Funny how those gatherings nearly always manage to take place at warm-weather locations during the colder times of year.

The drug companies also sponsor the occasional dinner at fancy local restaurants to talk to doctors and nurses about their latest line of pharmaceutical products.

According to the website ProPublica.org, which has compiled a database of drug company payments to physicians, one Nashua doctor was paid $60,750 in speaking fees in 2012.

All told, the money flowing into the pockets of medical professionals from drug companies runs into the millions of dollars, which sounds like a lot but is really but a drop in the bucket to the companies that produce those drugs. They make billions from the prescriptions that doctors write.

The system is one that undermines public confidence in the medical profession by raising questions about whether doctors are prescribing certain drugs for legitimate medical reasons, or because they’re being paid by the companies that make those drugs.

In other words, the financial relationship between drug companies and doctors gives people reason to wonder whether doctors would be prescribing the same drug for the same illness if they weren’t taking payments.

Take, for example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, as it’s known.

According to an article in The New York Times published last weekend, “the rise of A.D.H.D. diagnoses and prescriptions for stimulants over the years coincided with a remarkably successful two-decade campaign by pharmaceutical companies to publicize the syndrome and promote the pills to doctors, educators and parents.”

The drug industry, according to its critics, comes up with the cure and then throws money at doctors until they diagnose the disease in numbers sufficient to make that cure profitable.

Increasingly, the financial relationship is coming under greater scrutiny, and it should. It’s a huge conflict of interest, not to mention a corruption of the relationship between a doctor and patient.

This week, pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline announced an end to the practice of paying doctors to promote its products.

We think the announcement is a step in the right direction and illustrates the power of transparency. Next year, drug companies will be required by the Affordable Care Act to make public their payments to doctors. You’ll be able to look it up on a government website. Well, at least in theory.

Eventually, we expect, other drug companies will end the practice of paying doctors.

What would be even better is for local hospitals and medical practices to take the lead and wean themselves off the money now, by adopting policies that prevent doctors and staff from taking such payments.

There will come a time, we suspect, when the memory of doctors being paid by drug companies will be regarded in much the same way as the days when it was not at all uncommon to walk into a doctor’s office and see the physician sitting behind a desk, smoking a cigarette.

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