So, I found something to write about while we wait for the EMA. Consider it, however, a fluff piece because I found something where I could agree with an industry driven point. The post about it by Ed Silverman is on Pharmalot [Does the Open Payments Database ‘Distort’ What Docs Get For Research?]. He’s writing about an article in the Annals of Internal Medicine [on-line first] called Forecast for the Physician Payment Sunshine Act: Partly to Mostly Cloudy? You can only read the first page, but that’s the meat of this short article.
The Sunshine Act requires payments made to physicians be reported on a publicly available database [good] including payments for research [good]. But it includes the estimated cost of any medication donated for clinical trials reported as payment to the Principle Investigator. We all know that we want to see the payments made to doctors as an index of Conflicts of Interest. These authors contend that doctors doing Clinical Trials will all look like crooks if this is tacked onto their Sunshine Report. So any investigator studying Solvadi at $1000/dose is going to look bad and he/she might really be a saint.
That sounds reasonable to me. We’re interested in personal or institutional profiteering by doctors working for drug companies, and this will distort things. So I agree. But this is a fluff piece because it seems like an attempt to prove my balanced judgement in terms of drug companies paying [buying] doctors. My judgement in this regard is anything but balanced. I personally think that the number of doctors being paid by drug companies is beyond scandalous and needs to be squashed with more than sunshine [see the chart in to get us started…]. DDT would be more like it. But it was fun to finally find something about the backlash to the Sunshine Act I can agree with…
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