Tag Archives: Stefan Kruszewski

Doctors’ Conflicting Interests Can Cost Money and Lives, and Hinder Medical Discoveries

The fact that doctors take money from pharmaceutical companies happens to be old news. But this time around, the docs in question come from Stanford University. Previous news stories reported that doctors receiving pharmaceutical funding hailed from Harvard, the University of Miami, the Medical College of Georgia and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.

More than a few of these doctors are psychiatrists who have received tax-supported, public National Institutes of Health and National Institute of Mental Health funding for clinical research, have participated in U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panels or have appeared on, or on behalf of, various not-for-profit psychiatric advocacy boards — some of which are heavily supported by the manufacturers of psychiatric medications.

A sugared pill

When Daniel Carlat, a psychiatrist in Massachusetts, was flown to New York with his wife by Wyeth, the “training” weekend he attended in a luxury hotel was topped off with a Broadway show. It was early 2001 and he had just agreed to the US pharmaceuticals company’s proposal that he give talks to doctors about its antidepressant Effexor. During the following year, he was regularly paid fees of $750 a time to drive to “lunch and learn” sessions where he would speak for 10 minutes to emphasise the drug’s advantages to fellow doctors, using slides prepared by the company. “It seemed like a win-win,” he recalls. “I was prescribing it, educating doctors and making some money.” But within a few months, he became disillusioned with his co-option as a marketing representative. He was selectively presenting clinical data that put the drug in a positive light to physicians who had been targeted by the company through “data mining” techniques that identified their individual prescription patterns.Dr Carlat has spoken out as part of a growing backlash against such aggressive marketing tactics, which are leading to significant changes in the relationship between doctors and drug companies. But even as pharmaceuticals executives argue that such problems belong to the past and were always exaggerated, they are bracing for both intensifying penalties and calls for further reform.