Furious Seasons

May 20, 2008

$88 Million From Big Pharma To Minnesota Psychiatrists

Yes, you read that correctly. State records in Minnesota--which requires public disclosure of payouts to docs---indicate that psychiatrists in the state have received $88 million in gifts, grants and fees from Big Pharma since 2002. This comes from the St. Paul Pioneer-Press, which is running a kickass series in the wake of a patient committing suicide in a clinical trial of Seroquel in 2004.

"The amounts aren't unusual, according to the payment records collected by the Minnesota Board of Pharmacy. The records, which were updated this month to include 2007 figures, show 167 Minnesota doctors who have received $100,000 or more since 2002. One in four psychiatrists has received funding from pharmaceutical companies, averaging about $50,000 over the six years."

I'm sure all of these docs diagnose disorders and prescribe drugs in a completely unbiased manner as a result. If the payments are this lofty in Minnesota, then you've got to wonder what they are in California and New York. But we don't know because those states don't require payments to be reported publicly. The two doctors in the Seroquel trial got $782,000 from pharma companies.

"A growing body of research suggests that drug company money has an influence on study outcomes. One analysis found that industry-funded research was four to five times more likely to produce positive outcomes for a paying company's drug than federally funded research. A report last year found that drug company-funded studies of cholesterol medications were much more likely to produce results that favored their own drugs as well."

This ugly little system needs to be stopped. It's not like psychiatrists are starving in the streets. The average American psych doc pulls in $180,000 a year already.

AstraZeneca, which makes Seroquel, offered this response to the paper:

"AstraZeneca declined to discuss documents from the case, but brand corporate affairs manager Abigail Baron said the company's financial arrangements with doctors are necessary to improve health through drug discovery.
"'That mission cannot be fulfilled," she said, 'without close partnership with those on the front lines of patient care and ... research.'"

I'd say the money AZ and others are throwing around buys them all kinds of partnership.

Posted by Philip Dawdy at May 20, 2008 07:56 AM

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Comments

Marketing the drug is one of the key issue.
Psychiatrists receiving to prescribe is a crime to say the least.

. In questioning the adequacy of the official action taken so far, he raises basic questions about the competency of drug regulators and the lack of transparency in tackling user dependency and complaints in many countries.

Part of this new and imperative emphasis on marketing involves relentless demonstrations of the triumph of benefit compared with risk, and the promotion of drugs for much more than they are worth. In this case, it also meant that the Pharmas tackled problems by challenging perceptions of risk and by ignoring or denying evidence of harm. In so doing, they systematically exploited the dependencies of governments and the medical establishment. There was little resistance, partly because the Pharmas were also dependent on them. Commercial sponsorship both sustained and undermined the reputation and independence of political, professional and academic institutions, drug regulatory systems, even patient organizations and the World Health Organization."

But on the negative side, Pharmas were becoming expert at the subversion and manipulation of patients' views, by buying their way into patient organizations and other similar devices. As a result, patients' views "were increasingly orchestrated by marketing departments, public relations agencies and Pharma-sponsored patient organizations."

But above all, Medawar suggests that the underlying policy objectives for pharmaceuticals are ill-founded. The main impetus for the recent EU changes in its pharmaceutical rules was the concern that the Pharmas were migrating to the US because the US was doing "better" than Europe; but, says Medawar, the perception was based on the assumption that drug innovation was what really mattered, and that quality of innovation could be measured just by the economic returns.

http://www.ptemag.com/pharmtecheurope/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=97092&sk=&date=&pageID=4

Economic returns is and will be for a long the main concern about HEALTH.
The sole aim of this phase of capitalism is making money.
Making money, money and more money.
No matter by which means.
Children are being prescribed, people are getting sick under drugs...
Iatrogenic diseases, deaths, all this scandal...
... it doesn't matter.

Posted by: Ana at May 22, 2008 12:18 PM