Among those who were paid the most in Central Florida's five counties are Dr. Craig Curtis, an Orlando researcher who received $918,938 from three drug companies; Jane Hertz, a registered nurse in The Villages who was paid $111,295 by Eli Lilly; and Dr. Damon Tanton, an endocrinologist at Florida Hospital Celebration Health who earned $67,509 from Lilly.
While some payments, such as those that support research, are necessary, money paid to doctors to curry favor and encourage them to promote a company's medications crosses an ethical line, say industry watchdogs.
"If a physician is part of a controlled clinical trial and is prescribing the drug for that research and fully informing the patient, that's appropriate. But when a physician starts accepting speaking engagements or gets paid to do TV ads, that is not," said Aaron Liberman, professor of health management at UCF College of Health and Public Affairs.
"We know that if a doctor is getting paid by a pharmaceutical [company], he or she will be more favorable to the medications that company produces," said Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of health research at Public Citizen, a Washington, D.C.-based consumer-watchdog group. "It would be impossible for payments not to influence judgment."
Since 2009, drug companies have started to make their payments public, some as a condition for settling claims against them. The 12 companies in the newly released database represent about 40 percent of the U.S. drug market.
All totaled, drug companies doled out more than $760 million to American health providers between 2009 and the second quarter of 2011, according to the report.
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