This Al Jazeera documentary, called “Drug Money”, emphasizes three things.
1. Doctors get vast amounts of money from drug companies, which influences which drugs they prescribe. One influential doctor, Tom Stossel of Harvard, who has received “millions” from drug companies, sees no problem with that!
2. Drug companies encourage the prescription of drugs for unapproved uses. For this and other crimes, more than half of the major drug companies have been found guilty and fined billions of dollars. Several of the not-yet-guilty ones are under investigation. The problem is industry-wide, not due to a “bad apple”.
3. The harm done by deceptive practices isn’t trivial. One example is Risperdal. It isn’t approved to treat ADHD in children, but it is prescribed for that. Given to boys, it can cause them to grow breasts, which is extremely embarrassing. When the boys were given the drugs, their parents were unaware of this possibility. Joseph Biederman, another Harvard professor who has received millions from drug companies and an advocate of giving Risperdal to children, told a Congressional committee he had no idea that a large fraction of all Risperdal is given to children (“I have no idea how much Risperdal is used in children”).
Thanks to Anne Weiss.
The sheer amount of money on the upper end is troubling. But I’m surprised at your disapproval of off-label uses. Isn’t one of your bugaboos the fact that large institutions like the FDA are too slow at recognizing new data, and have outdated recommendations that clever researchers should question? To be consistent, you should approve of the study and employment of off-label uses for drugs as a good innovative thing.
Imagine the anger and harsh penalties if a non-professional individual were to directly cause just one boy to grow breasts. Whether motivated by greed or neglect, it would be a mass media horror-story and there’d be an expectation of a prison-sentence. A doctor who was irrefutably found to do this for knowingly dishonest motives would be struck off; drug-companies have no analogous punishment: they are never dissolved, taken over by the state; the bosses are not personally punished – they are not prevented from doing similar things again.
Should a law require doctors to inform patients of conflicts of interest?
that tom stossel is the brother of the reporter jon stossel, kind of ironic
“Isn’t one of your bugaboos the fact that large institutions like the FDA are too slow at recognizing new data”? I’m afraid I’m unable to figure out why you say that. Giving thousands of children dangerous untested drugs in order to boost profits is obscene — that’s what I think.
Using a drug for an unapproved use is not always a bad thing.
For an excellent (if infuriating) treatment of corruption and pseudoscience in the field of psychiatric drugs, see Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, by Robert Whitaker. See also Whitaker’s recent op-ed piece, “It’s time to end this grand experiment with psychiatric drugs”. (And no, I’m not a Scientologist.)
I have been in practice for 27 years but I have never received any payment to prescribe a drug.
Jim Ellison, money flows from drug companies to doctors in a dozen ways. Conferences, speakers fees, meals, samples, and so on. I don’t think it’s ever as crass as “you prescribe X, I’ll give you $$$”. If you have never received anything valuable from a drug company, I would like to hear about it.