The Doctor Drug Pusher
Great piece by a psychiatrist who used to give lunchtime talks to other docs to promote Effexor. $750 a pop for an hour’s talk. And you wonder why it’s easy for doctors to get mixed up in it all. (Answer: we’re human.)
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Great piece by a psychiatrist who used to give lunchtime talks to other docs to promote Effexor. $750 a pop for an hour’s talk. And you wonder why it’s easy for doctors to get mixed up in it all. (Answer: we’re human.)
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Thanks for providing the link. What a great piece!
The answer isn’t that doctors are human, but that some are greedy. The doctor in this piece was lured by lots of money for little work, despite his strong reservations. I don’t think that all humans will share the tendency to set aside their professional judgment for fast cash, but the greedy ones will.
Great find, Graham.
All doctors (translation: all people) are tempted by greed, lust, sloth–just as much as anyone else.
Graham:
I agree with Lesley. In my experience, that spans 40 years of practicing medicine, I have found that it is a very small percentage of physicians who succumb to the temptations. As a semi-retired orthopedic surgeon, I have been doing independent medical evaluations for a number of years. In reviewing hundreds of charts, in that period of time, there have been only a small percentage of physicians, a high proportion of that number being surgeons, who seem to exploit the system out of greed.
Judging from the small number of physicians that have been disciplined by our Board of Medical Examiners, for sexual problems I believe that though tempted, few of us yield to lust.
Sloth isn’t much of a problem if a physician is in solos practice or in small group, because it wouldn’t take long for one’s income to suffer drastically.
I would urge you young M.D.’s to not be too harsh on our profession until experience gives you more of a basis from which to judge.
This is why it’s becoming more and more difficult to get pharma support for true medical education–not that it’s necessarily a bad thing. IT’s also why the Senate Finance committee did an in depth investigation to CME and pharma funding. We’ve all seen it. Is government regualation the answer?! God, NO! We’ve got to do a better job of regulating ourselves and each other. Great article, Graham. Thanks for sharing.
Dr. Thompson,
According to the linked article, 25% of U.S. physicians are paid speakers for drug companies. I’d call that more than “a very small percentage” who are giving in to temptation. Maybe you’ve seen few give in to illegal forms of greed — why would they bother to risk it when the legal forms like this are so lucrative?