This is a decent site, but it has a tendency to overstate the significance of some of the 'payments'.
First, it doesn't seem to be properly distinguishing between multiple doctors in a given private practice. That's a hard problem, and I don't fault them for it, but then it's a bit misleading to attribute a payment to a particular doctor's name when it could very well be a gift accepted by someone else in the same practice.
It's also including transfer of money that's associated with conferences. Physicians are required to perform continuing education in order to keep their skills up-to-date (which is a good thing!). Because of this, pharmaceutical companies have a really strong incentive to get themselves financially integrated into this process - and they've succeeded. This is certainly an unfortunate aspect of the medical field, but it's not really something that's possible to avoid, particularly in certain specialties. Personally, I'd rather have a physician who's up-to-date in their knowledge and practice than one who's not. It'd be great if this process were easily separable from pharmaceutical money, but in fields like oncology and psychiatry, it's near impossible.
The descriptions are a bit misleading too. For example, the tooltip for 'Food & Beverage' gives as an example, 'a salesperson asks a doctor if they can talk about a drug over a meal... and the salesperson pays for the meal'. This also includes gifts that are sent to the physicians (e.g., they send the office for the practice a bottle of wine, which was signed for by the receptionist, etc.).
Granted, if you see that your physician received $50,000 in payments for the very drug he/she wants to prescribe you, yes, that's definitely something to ask him/her about. But the data on this site, as it stands, is a lot less indicting than it first seems - it's really best used as a conversation starter between you and your physician rather than a condemnation of individual physicians or even the industry at large.
Anecdotal, I know, however I have a family member that shows up on the site. His number is low—less than a couple of hundred dollars—but I asked him about it when I first heard of the site from Last Week Tonight. His response was that they were medical device manufacturers taking his team out for meals to discuss devices they were either already using regularly or were in the process of trialing. I can't imagine anyone can find fault in such a thing.
I think the problem is that the current system lands somewhere in the "gray zone". The money doesn't appear to have an influencing effect, but we also don't know at what level it would start. I think a lot of people think it's uncomfortably close to "coercive".
With respect to conferences and continuing medical education, there's no need for this to be "subsidized" by drug companies, such conferences are already expensive to attend, despite such "subsidies" in any case.
Perhaps the conferences would end up being in less glamorous locations, but that would have little impact on their educational benefit.
Comments
See whether your doctor has received drug company money - https://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/
This is a decent site, but it has a tendency to overstate the significance of some of the 'payments'.
First, it doesn't seem to be properly distinguishing between multiple doctors in a given private practice. That's a hard problem, and I don't fault them for it, but then it's a bit misleading to attribute a payment to a particular doctor's name when it could very well be a gift accepted by someone else in the same practice.
It's also including transfer of money that's associated with conferences. Physicians are required to perform continuing education in order to keep their skills up-to-date (which is a good thing!). Because of this, pharmaceutical companies have a really strong incentive to get themselves financially integrated into this process - and they've succeeded. This is certainly an unfortunate aspect of the medical field, but it's not really something that's possible to avoid, particularly in certain specialties. Personally, I'd rather have a physician who's up-to-date in their knowledge and practice than one who's not. It'd be great if this process were easily separable from pharmaceutical money, but in fields like oncology and psychiatry, it's near impossible.
The descriptions are a bit misleading too. For example, the tooltip for 'Food & Beverage' gives as an example, 'a salesperson asks a doctor if they can talk about a drug over a meal... and the salesperson pays for the meal'. This also includes gifts that are sent to the physicians (e.g., they send the office for the practice a bottle of wine, which was signed for by the receptionist, etc.).
Granted, if you see that your physician received $50,000 in payments for the very drug he/she wants to prescribe you, yes, that's definitely something to ask him/her about. But the data on this site, as it stands, is a lot less indicting than it first seems - it's really best used as a conversation starter between you and your physician rather than a condemnation of individual physicians or even the industry at large.
Precisely.
Anecdotal, I know, however I have a family member that shows up on the site. His number is low—less than a couple of hundred dollars—but I asked him about it when I first heard of the site from Last Week Tonight. His response was that they were medical device manufacturers taking his team out for meals to discuss devices they were either already using regularly or were in the process of trialing. I can't imagine anyone can find fault in such a thing.
I think the problem is that the current system lands somewhere in the "gray zone". The money doesn't appear to have an influencing effect, but we also don't know at what level it would start. I think a lot of people think it's uncomfortably close to "coercive".
With respect to conferences and continuing medical education, there's no need for this to be "subsidized" by drug companies, such conferences are already expensive to attend, despite such "subsidies" in any case.
Perhaps the conferences would end up being in less glamorous locations, but that would have little impact on their educational benefit.
Isn't continuing education in most fields sort of a laugh, such as it is in the legal profession? Is this the case in medicine as well?
At least in Urban Planning, and certainly in software engineering it's definitely not a joke.
I've never heard of formal continuing education in software engineering in any way analogous to that in legal. Curious to know to what you refer.
Yes, in SE you've got to work hard to keep current, but this is not achieved by attending seminars and the like.