When you go to the pharmacy to pick up your prescriptions, you might think of yourself as a customer of the drug company that makes your medicine. That's what I used to think too.
But to the pharmaceutical industry, the key customer is the doctor who writes your prescription. Because without a prescription, you're not getting a drug. And it's the doctor who tells us which pills we need to take.
Which is why there is so much focus lately on drug company payments to doctors. A new database brings together payment data from seven drug companies. You can find out if your doctor is speaking or consulting for drug companies by checking our partner's site at ProPublica.
Of course, we want our doctors to be up on the latest science and understand the best evidence about which drugs work and which don't. The problem is how to get that information to doctors.
Critics say the presentations doctors are paid to make on behalf of drug companies are little more than marketing. They present information on a single drug and say little about cheaper generics or older drugs that might have fewer side effects.
Industry advocates say doctors are often slow to catch on to new treatments. Clinical inertia, it's called. Marketing, they argue, actually gets useful information to doctors who might otherwise be falling behind the curve.
Who is right? That's where the transparency comes in. Now you can see for yourself which doctors are taking money to speak for drug companies and how much. Transparency allows people outside the pharmaceutical industry to analyze payments to doctors and draw their own conclusions. That's what this project is all about.
Source: http://www.pbs.org/nbr/blog/2010/10/transparency_and_drug_company.html
No comments:
Post a Comment