Payola isn’t just for the recording industry anymore. Minnesota is the first state to require pharmaceutical companies to disclose payments to doctors. And, according to a New York Times report by Gardiner Harris and Janet Roberts, that disclosre is telling:
“The Minnesota records begin in 1997. From then through 2005, drug makers paid more than 5,500 doctors, nurses and other health care workers in the state at least $57 million. Another $40 million went to clinics, research centers and other organizations. More than 20 percent of the state’s licensed physicians received money. The median payment per consultant was $1,000; more than 100 people received more than $100,000.”
For dialysis patients, the big pharma payola is especially troubling. Dr. Allan Collins is president of the National Kidney Foundation. He’s also the director of a kidney disease research center and he’s on the faculty of the University of Minnesota. According to Harris and Roberts’s report, the pharmaceutical company Amgen—manufacturer of epogen, the anti-anemia drug—“underwrote more than US1.9 million worth of research and education programs led by Dr. Collins.” Three years later, National Kidney Foundation—of which Collins is president—issued anemia guidelines that heavily favored drug industry positions.
Harris and Roberts quote Washington University kidney specialist Dr. Daniel Coyne with regard to Collins’s relationship with Amgen:
“Amgen’s funding for Dr. Collins’s MMRF [Minneapolis Medical Research Foundation] is another huge financial connection to individuals at the National Kidney Foundation. The foundation’s recent pro-industry anemia guidelines—and the revisions due next month—have to be viewed with great skepticism.”
On the other hand, Christopher Rowland’s article in the Boston Globe last November, sourced Collins’s data finding that dialysis centers operated by DaVita—the largest provider of dialysis services in the US—“tend to ‘overshoot’ the FDA amenia treatment limits” for use of epogen. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has since issued a public health advisory and a black box warning for epogen.
A larger problem, according to Harris and Roberts, is that “research shows that doctors who have close relationships with drug makers tend to prescribe more, newer and pricier drugs—whether or not they are in the best interests of patients.”
Well it is true that money used to pay people in medical industry come most of the times from drug sales, but I mean, that’s just how things are. If someone has an issue with that, ask them whether they would like that money to come from heroin sales or from smuggling weapons. You have to know when to stop.
I think this is only normal to happen after all, for if it weren’t for doctors, who would help them create all those new drugs, who would supervise their administration and who would give them the necessary data about a disease’s evolution in order for them to make new drugs.