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Marketplace
Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Doctors' drug-industry ties made public

The Cleveland Clinic has announced it's going to disclose its doctors' ties to the drug industry, upfront, on its website. Janet Babin reports.

TEXT OF STORY
KAI RYSSDAL: Drug companies spend a lot of time and money trying to convince doctors to prescribe their products.
That's not, in and of itself, a problem. It's called marketing.

When there's a personal financial relationship, that's another question. A physician's endorsement can help turn a pill into a
blockbuster. But what if it's at the expense of some kind of alternative treatment and the patient never knows about the
relationship.

Today The Cleveland Clinic announced it's going to disclose its doctors' ties to the drug industry -- upfront -- on its website. Screen capture from Dr. Mercedes
Dullum's page on the Cleveland Clinic
website. (ClevelandClinic.org)
Janet Babin reports from the Marketplace Innovations Desk at North Carolina Public Radio.

JANET BABIN: In the "Find a doctor" section of the Cleveland Clinic's website, Dr. Mercedes Dullum is listed as a cardiac surgeon. I can review her
photo, bio, and now, find out that she has a partnership with a medical device company called Cormatrix.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, says the Cleveland Clinic's Guy Chisolm:

GUY CHISOLM: Partnerships with industry are not evil, and they're not all bad and they're not all prejudicial. But you want to do these
partnerships ethically, and you want to do them where you eliminate bias.

Bias issues between doctors and the drug industry have come to a head this year. A congressional inquiry found that some physicians were making millions
reviewing drug trials. They failed to reveal that they were being paid by the drug companies.
But T Rowe Price analyst Jay Markowitz says it is possible to get paid and still be objective.

JAY MARKOWITZ: I don't view the kind of payment for time and services as a bribe to lie about the risks and benefits of a treatment.

Still, studies have shown that company-sponsored research is more likely to produce positive results.

David Hamilton at B-Net.com says it's just human nature.

DAVID HAMILTON: If somebody gives you a lot of money, even if it's to support your research, even if you're not benefiting personally from it,
you start thinking of them more as, you know, friends than as people you're doing business with.

Disclosure may be the first step in treating medical conflicts of interest.

I'm Janet Babin for Marketplace.

COMMENTS Comment | Refresh

By patrick dunaway
From Glendale, CA, 12/06/2008

The pharmacuetical industry and the psychiatric industry have long fooled the people, like the tobacco companies, about their products yet their products are probably
worse in the long run in the damage to families, individuals and the culture in general. Suicide, death, psychotic breaks and going Postal are just some of the wonders of
modern anti depressant drugs and these boys are in bed together in suppressing the known side effects of these drugs-they are no less than criminals and the government
and the FDA protects them.

By Janet Stein
From Los Angeles, CA, 12/05/2008

I take the position that doctor-industry partnerships inevitably serve the public ill and should not be allowed. Sen. Grassley recently brought to light the way certain
psychiatrists such as Biederman heavily promoted the use of psychiatric drugs on radio shows that purported to be completely objective. Suppose he had admitted at the
beginning of the program "I was paid thousands by the company that makes this drug"? Wouldn't that have influenced his listeners to not accept his recommendations
uncritically?

By Jon von Gunten

From Los Angeles, CA, 12/05/2008

Big Pharma, meet Karma.

The shocking point is that no reporter is asking about the historical effects of these monetary relationships. How long have they been occurring? Was any legislation passed,

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Marketplace: Doctors' drug-industry ties made public http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/12/03/pm_clevelan...

repealed or diluted that now allows this to occur? Who sponsored and voted for it? What are these politicians’ funding sources? Which other psychiatric drugs have
benefited from the "covert expert" endorsement approach?

Interesting that this phenomenon does not so frequently occur with pharmaceuticals that address more empirically and chemically diagnosable symptoms and conditions.
There's less room for hype and august opinions when the medical condition is definable by blood chemistry, swellings, lesions or X-rays.

Psychiatric medications also require extra marketing slush funds because they are so often linked to "new violence" in previously non-violent patients, e.g., the many school
shootings that correlate to the prescriptions of such drugs.

Only in the psychiatric field do we get *this extent* of drug sales relying more upon experts’ word of mouth than upon demonstrable benefit with a minimum of side
effects--the yardstick most people would apply before taking any drug.

Shouldn’t the high decibel level of sales talks have been our first clue? These drugs’ erratic efficacy needed more marketing help than simple charts of their
effectiveness and harmful side effects would have produced.

By Dave Silberstein
From Los Angeles, CA, 12/05/2008

The profitability of Big Pharma at the expense of patient welfare is coming to light. Hooray. I'm hoping that the FDA, which has been a toothless tiger under Bush, will
finally come back to its mandate and reorganize the industry's priorities.

For in-depth background on this issue and especially how the psych drugmakers are having an adverse effect on national health, read "Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry
is Medicating a Nation" by Charles Barber

By Alan Gilbertson
From Los Angeles, CA, 12/04/2008

Very on point, as this is a serious and increasing "marketing" issue. The biggest culprits in this arena are the psychiatric profession and their professional body, the APA,
who collect millions annually to promote pharmaceuticals not only to their own colleagues, but to general practitioners. The issue becomes even more serious when
promotion of off-label leads to the deaths and disablity of thousands of uninformed patients from side effects. Europe is way ahead of us in coming down hard on this kind
of thing. We need to do much, much better.

By Gaiko Kyofusho
From NC, 12/04/2008

Isn't there a site that does this nationwide? (not that i know how they would do this). I thought that i heard something about this, i am kicking myself for not writing down
info about it because i can't seem to find it via google/yahoo/msn.

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