What Big Pharma pays your doctor...

Members of Innovative Medicines Canada (IMC), the lobby group for the large pharmaceutical companies, recently released their voluntary reports of payments to health-care professionals and health-care organizations.

Altogether, the 10 reporting companies paid out more than $75 million in 2017.

This is the second year of these disclosures. When they started, Russell Williams, then the IMC president, said on CBC’s The Current: “We’re open to continually improving and monitoring” the disclosures. According to the new president, Pamela Fralick, the 2016 revelations were only a first step and she expected more companies to disclose payments in 2017.

Come the 2017 disclosures, and there are still the same 10 companies. Moreover, the disclosures are actually not on the IMC website, they are on the individual companies’ websites and are not easy to find. It takes at least a couple of mouse clicks to locate the material. Nor is there any more detail this year than last year about how the money is used.

IMC touts these disclosures as “part of our commitment to high ethical standards and enhancing trust.”

But all that the companies have disclosed are gross figures — with no information about what they paid for. ...

Ver también:

Farmaindustria: transferencias de valor 2017

Free meals increase prescriptions

Disclosure is only the first step. Payments made to doctors can be linked to how they prescribe.

In the U.S., this has been analyzed using the Medicare database. The links show an association between the amount of money doctors get and their prescription of brand-name statins (cholesterol-lowering drugs) rather than much less expensive generic versions.

Receipt of industry-sponsored meals with a value of less than $20 is associated with an increased rate of prescribing the brand-name medication that is being promoted.

Receiving money from opioid makers in one year is associated with prescribing more opioids the next year. 

Ver:

Are Doctors Really Influenced by the Pharmaceutical Industry? / Los conflictos de intereses...

OPIOIDES: Mas Rx después de cenar...

Perhaps this is why IMC doesn’t want to take disclosures any further. This lobby group is afraid that Canadians will realize the perverse effects of all the payments its member companies make.(Más)