How Much Does Your Doctor Take from Drug Companies?

Redwood City doctors have taken at least $151,000 from drug companies over the last three years for meals, trips, lectures and consulting fees.

For years, drug companies hid numbers like that from consumers, but as a result of federal lawsuits, two years ago they began making them public on their websites, although not always plainly. The journalists at ProPublica have compiled a nationwide database of what doctors are taking. You can access it here by doctor's name or city.

The top local beneficiaries were rheumatologist Gurkirpal Singh Sehgal, who received $68,327 from the drug company Pfizer for speaking and travel; Rhonda Elaine Lambert, who received $27,837 from Pfizer for speaking and travel and Rafael Pelayo who received $27,154 from Cephalon.

Not all drug companies have submitted their records of doctor interactions, according to ProPublica, the independent, non-profit organization of investigative reporters. Roughly about 40 percent of U.S. drug sales are represented by the companies that have.

Medical ethicists have claimed improprieties in the way companies try to manipulate doctors into recommending their products. However, many doctors argue that there is no ethical quandry in being paid to educate other doctors about the best drugs and the best ways to use them.

The ethicists say that drug company marketing can often trump science. According to a presentation by researcher E. Haavi Morreim to the Markulla Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, doctors were more prone to prescribe drugs that the companies have marketed to them, whether they knew it or not.

The paper, entitled "Prescribing Under the Influence," gave anecdotal and scientific evidence that doctors, like most consumers, can be consciously or unconsciously influenced by the power of marketing.

In one study, 71 percent of doctors were proven to have believed marketing over scientific evidence to the contrary, while others, taken on a lavish trip by a drug company, doubled and tripled their prescriptions for its products.

However, doctors argue that drug companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to research new drugs and have to teach doctors how best to use them, as well as using the best scientific field work to market them.

Drug companies have paid for meals and lavish trips for doctors – all legally – and given them exhorbitant speaking fees, sometimes in places they would want to bring their families for vacations.

They have also stepped over the lines. GlaxoSmithKline paid a $3 billion settlement with the U.S. government over charges that it encouraged doctors to use drugs for purposes other than those for which they were approved and earned big money doing so.

Some hospitals and medical schools ban doctors from accepting gifts from drug reps, including the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University and Stanford University, according to USA Today.

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