Most members of the public may not realize this, but whenever a Food and Drug Administration committee meets to review a drug, an expert often appears to discuss the virtues of the medicine on behalf of the company seeking regulatory approval.
Now, a new analysis finds that many experts who spoke before the FDA committee that reviews cancer drugs held financial conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry.
Specifically, the analysis identified 38 experts and found that 92 percent — or 35 of them — had received industry payments. And 47 percent — or 18 experts — had documented payments from the specific drug makers that were hoping to win an FDA approval. Moreover, there were significant correlations found between the number of published articles, total citations and industry payments
About the Author Reprints
For years I developed therapies and devices for my company Hydro Med Inc. I often hesitated to recommend my product to the patient. One even practically demanded that I recommend my Hydro Pulse to her.
Now that I have sold my company and no longer have any financial interest or incentive to recommend my products, I find that I am practically recommending them to almost every patient! Of course, only where it is indicated, but now that I am free of “conflict of interest”, I am “emotionally” free of any hesitation to make recommendation for my products! Weird.
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Re Top Doctors Receive Financial Renumeration from drug companies: shouldn’t drug companies seek the top doctors? And doing drug evaluations takes time – doctors should be paid for that time. Why is this considered unfair? There is no reason why the paid doctor can’t be as honest and objective about a drug as he would with a patient.