Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16415

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Metherell M
Pharma cash integrity threat
The Age 2009 Sep 7
http://www.theage.com.au/national/pharma-cash-integrity-threat-20090906-fcur.html

Full text:

A LEADING psychiatrist who has received thousands of dollars from drug companies has broken cover, appealing for his colleagues to disclose the payments they routinely receive for industry-sponsored activities.

The medical profession faces a credibility problem of ‘‘unheralded proportions’‘ because of the money drug companies lavish on influential medical figures, says Philip Mitchell, who heads the school of psychiatry at the University of NSW.

Professor Mitchell has declared he was paid $6500 by three drug companies in 2007-08 for lectures, consultancies and as a company advisory board member, as well as international travel to give an invited lecture.

He told The Age the vast majority of medical experts that drug companies paid for their expertise were above reproach and ‘‘don’t just say what the companies want’‘.

But he says doctors now have a credibility problem following the ‘‘outing’‘ in the United States of payments – running into millions of dollars – by pharmaceutical companies to medical experts who supported their products.

In Australia, he said, ‘‘self-regulation by the medical profession has been largely ineffective’‘, despite the best intentions of groups within the profession.

‘‘This is a problem for both industry and the profession. We now have a major credibility problem with the public; it is an issue of trust’‘, Professor Mitchell said in a Medical Journal of Australia article out today.

Drug company largesse was aimed at senior doctors, usually academics, whose opinions were considered influential.

The industry group Medicines Australia produces a detailed record of drug company-sponsored educational and promotional events that show there were 30,000 such events last year. The disclosure is required by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission but the requirement does not extend to disclosing the names of doctors receiving payments.