To the editor:
Per Detailing Financial Links of Doctors and Drug Makers (NYT, October 1, 2014), collaborations between physicians and industry are fundamental to advancing medicine. Without in any way diminishing the governmental and non-profit agencies that support research, it is the partnership between physicians and industry that has created many, if not most, of the major medical breakthroughs that have reduced the rates of death and other serious outcomes in recent years – as any literature search of major medical journals will quickly confirm.
Conducting clinical research has become so rigorous and sophisticated that those who serve as consultants and investigators to industry recognize it as a major commitment or even a primary career path. In addition, as studies are completed, physician researchers add to their professional commitment by becoming the teachers of this new information.
Critics of these collaborations see compensation of physicians as evidence of undue influence on medical practice. But doctors, like all professionals, should be paid fairly for their time and work. The truth is that physicians who are busy with these activities are not as well rewarded as their fellow specialists in full-time clinical practice. Adding to this remunerative divergence is that a key part of research, writing articles for publication, takes weeks of work -- often unpaid so as to avoid any suggestion of bias.
The Sunshine Act will create troubling misconceptions for and about physicians. Payments reported for physicians by industry will likely include funding they didn’t personally receive nor will they take into account costs incurred by these physicians in paying their own staff and covering overhead expenses. Doctors involved in industry-supported research and education may easily get discouraged and frustrated explaining these complexities to an audience already biased and sated by sensationalistic media reports of physicians “on the take.”
And yet the Sunshine Act, paradoxically, could have a positive effect. Despite the near impossibility of reliably interpreting all the reported data, this information might well serve as a yardstick of cooperative achievement --identifying those physicians at the forefront of medical innovation.
Peter J. Pitts
Pitts, a former FDA Associate Commissioner, is President of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest
