It is no secret that the pharmaceutical industry is a racket, but what many people do not know is that doctors everywhere are the ones facilitating that racket. Particularly academic doctors rake in tens of millions of dollars a year from Big Pharma while, as Sensible Medicine puts it:
"... simultaneously writing guidelines that mandate the use of these drugs, and simultaneously prescribing them to desperate sick patients who want an objective opinion, but get a biased one instead."
A closer look at the National Comprehensive Cancer Network guidelines reveals that upwards of 85 percent of guideline writers accept cash from the pharmaceutical industry and its representatives.
Prof. Vinay Prasad says that ASCO, "our annual meeting" as he calls it, "is less about the objective appraisal of science and more a marketing conference for Pharma."
(Related: When the pharmaceutical industry's drugs are no longer profitable, corporations simply rebrand them for new uses and voila: a new profit stream is created.)
Three reasons why doctors defend their bribe payments
Prasad says that doctors who accept bribe payments from Big Pharma routinely make excuses as to why they have to, one of them being that money is needed to run trials.
Without those hefty pharma payments, some doctors say they would never be able to fund their research. Prasad says this is not actually the case and that doctors are basically lying.
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"The problem with this argument is that Pharma makes two different types of payments. Research payments go to universities and fund trials, and personal payments go into the doctor's pocket," he says.
"You don't have to take personal payments to get research payments. Vincent Rajkumar, Mayo, runs trials but doesn’t take personal payments."
Another common excuse doctors make is like the first one: If they do not take payments, then they will remain underpaid academics with little room to expand the field of science and medicine.
Prasad says this excuse fascinates him the most because academics are among the highest paid people in the workforce.
"Approximately ~100% of academic oncologists eat well every night, don’t lose their homes, send their kids to college, and die with millions in the bank," he writes. "Taking a lifetime of pharma payments changes the number they die with from, say, 11 million to 14.5 million, or 6 to 7.5."
Finally, one of the most common excuses that bought-off doctors give for why they take pharma payments is that everyone else is doing it so why not? In other words, greed is why doctors take pharma payments in exchange for doing pharma's bidding.
"As, I enter my tenth year on faculty in oncology, and near 20 years in medicine, I have come to believe that naked greed is a driving factor here," Prasad says.
"People feel satisfied knowing they are making more than their peers – even as they die without spending it all. Oncologists often love to scoop up free swag at conferences even though these largely sit unused in their homes, and who the hell really needs another notepad?"
When the history books are written about what is happening in today's world, it will not speak well of the medical profession. Until or unless all of this corruption is fully rooted out, the general public would do well to take all doctors' opinions and recommendations with a grain of salt.
The pharmaceutical industry is corrupt to the core. Learn more at BigPharmaNews.com.
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