Physicians, Drug Companies Too Cozy for Comfort: Study
Is your physician taking gifts from drug companies? (CBS/iStockphoto)
(CBS) In other industries you might call it a bribe, but when drug companies provide travel expenses, consulting fees and other goodies to doctors, it's just called doing business.
At least that's the conclusion of a new study by the Mongan Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital, which took the moral pulse of 1,900 physicians across the country.
The good news? The number of docs on the dole has fallen from an astounding 94 percent in 2004. The bad news? Three quarters of America's physicians still take some kind of hand outs from companies who want them to prescribe their medicine to their patients, according the study.
And it seems to work.
Doctors with "industry relationships" were more likely to self-report prescribing big ticket drugs, according to the paper. And regions with higher health care costs tended to have more cozy relationships.
Study author Dr. Eric G. Campbell of the Harvard Medical School put it this way: "Our finding of a significant association between physician-industry relationships and the use of more expensive drugs suggests that future investigations of factors underlying high-cost medicine should explore the possible driving role of these relationships."
His group is calling for more transparency.
In doctors' defense, the most commonly accepted items were free drug samples and food and drinks, hopefully not the kind of perks that sway medical decisions.
The study was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
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you could also talk about scare campaign of big pharma to sell their vaccines , H1N1 ect...
How they control the FDA to get their poisons on the market without
peer reviews or proper studies...they put the pill on the market , make billions and then they settle in court for peanuts...
How they create opiate based antidepressants so the patient gets hooked on them...not because they need it but because the horrible withdrawal
effects...much like heroin , opium ect...
The real question is...How come big pharma does not find cures anymore??
they only target symptoms relief...but never the cure...
because it pays more to keep somemone buying the pills every month ..
Ask yourself the following : when is the last time Pharmas found a cure for something????
Now that is the question you should ask and enquire about...
But you wont...