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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16445

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
Drug company money 'hurts our credibility'
The Sydney Morning Herald 2009 Sep 7
http://www.smh.com.au/national/drug-company-money-hurts-our-credibility-20090906-fctx.html


Full text:

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

The medical profession faces a credibility problem 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 Herald the vast majority of medical experts drug companies paid for their expertise ‘‘don’t just say what the companies want’‘. But he says doctors now have a credibility problem following the ‘‘outing’‘ of payments running into millions of dollars by pharmaceutical companies to medical experts who supported their products in the US.

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

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

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

The chief executive of Medicines Australia, Ian Chalmers, disputed the assessment of the profession’s relationship with the pharmaceutical industry. ‘‘Market research with doctors in Australia consistently reports broad satisfaction with the relationship.’‘

 

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...to influence multinational corporations effectively, the efforts of governments will have to be complemented by others, notably the many voluntary organisations that have shown they can effectively represent society’s public-health interests…
A small group known as Healthy Skepticism; formerly the Medical Lobby for Appropriate Marketing) has consistently and insistently drawn the attention of producers to promotional malpractice, calling for (and often securing) correction. These organisations [Healthy Skepticism, Médecins Sans Frontières and Health Action International] are small, but they are capable; they bear malice towards no one, and they are inscrutably honest. If industry is indeed persuaded to face up to its social responsibilities in the coming years it may well be because of these associations and others like them.
- Dukes MN. Accountability of the pharmaceutical industry. Lancet. 2002 Nov 23; 360(9346)1682-4.