Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story Of Corruption
I’m not one to speculate about the future of an industry. In fact I know several very intelligent value investors have recently put money into the sector betting on it being undervalued. This article reviews an upcoming book on the corruption present in drug company & doctor relationships. It might be interesting for those of you planning on investing in the pharmaceutical companies. Click Here To Read A Book Review On: Drug Companies & Doctors: A story of Corruption
Article Introduction (Via NY Review of Books)
Recently Senator Charles Grassley, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, has been looking into financial ties between the pharmaceutical industry and the academic physicians who largely determine the market value of prescription drugs. He hasn’t had to look very hard.
Take the case of Dr. Joseph L. Biederman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of pediatric psychopharmacology at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital. Thanks largely to him, children as young as two years old are now being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with a cocktail of powerful drugs, many of which were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for that purpose and none of which were approved for children below ten years of age.
Legally, physicians may use drugs that have already been approved for a particular purpose for any other purpose they choose, but such use should be based on good published scientific evidence. That seems not to be the case here. Biederman’s own studies of the drugs he advocates to treat childhood bipolar disorder were, as The New York Times summarized the opinions of its expert sources, “so small and loosely designed that they were largely inconclusive.”
Article Excerpts (Via NY Review Of Books)
“Emory benefited from Nemeroff’s grants and other activities, and that raises the question of whether its lax oversight was influenced by its own conflicts of interest.”
“Indeed, most doctors take money or gifts from drug companies in one way or another. Many are paid consultants, speakers at company-sponsored meetings, ghost-authors of papers written by drug companies or their agents,and ostensible “researchers” whose contribution often consists merely of putting their patients on a drug and transmitting some token information to the company.”
“A few decades ago, medical schools did not have extensive financial dealings with industry, and faculty investigators who carried out industry-sponsored research generally did not have other ties to their sponsors. But schools now have their own manifold deals with industry and are hardly in a moral position to object to their faculty behaving in the same way.”
“Because drug companies insist as a condition of providing funding that they be intimately involved in all aspects of the research they sponsor, they can easily introduce bias in order to make their drugs look better and safer than they are.”
Click Here To Read A Book Review On: Drug Companies & Doctors: A story of Corruption
