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Lähettäjä: Soijuv Lähetetty: 25.8.2005 9:28

Heinäkuun Wall Street Journalissa kerrottiin lääketeollisuuden palkkaavan lääkäreitä edesauttamaan lääkkeidensä myyntiä yms:


THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
To Sell Their Drugs, Companies Increasingly Rely on Doctors For $750 and Up, Physicians Tell Peers About Products; Talks Called Educational Dr. Pitts's Busy Speaking Tour

By SCOTT HENSLEY and BARBARA MARTINEZ July 15, 2005; Page A1

NEW YORK -- On a recent Wednesday evening, neurologist Lawrence Newman spoke to a dozen doctors in a private alcove off the soaring dining room of Guastavino's and made the case that migraine headaches are seriously underdiagnosed. Migraine treatment "should be bread and butter for primary-care doctors," he told attendees at the midtown Manhattan restaurant. While patients might say they're having a sinus headache, there's a good chance it's actually a migraine and can be reated with a migraine drug, Dr. Newman said.

It was a message friendly to migraine-drug makers, and no wonder: The sponsor of the talk was GlaxoSmithKline PLC, maker of the best-selling migraine pill Imitrex. Glaxo picked up the tab for dinner, paid Dr. Newman a fee, supplied some of his slides, and scattered Imitrex notepads on the table.

Drug makers have seized upon an effective tool for getting their message across to doctors: other doctors.

[Pitching Pills]

Across the U.S., thousands of doctors such as Dr. Newman, an associate professor of clinical neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, have signed up as part-time lecturers for drug companies. At small meetings, often over lunch or dinner, these physician-pitchmen tell their peers about diseases and the drugs to treat them, often pocketing $750 or more from the sponsor.

Dr. Newman declined to discuss his fee.

In 2004, 237,000 meetings and talks sponsored by pharmaceutical companies featured doctors as speakers, compared with 134,000 meetings led by company sales representatives, according to market researcher Verispan LLC of Yardley, Pa. In 1998, events featuring sales reps and physicians were about equal at just over 60,000 each, Verispan says.

The growing use of talks by doctors comes as drug makers face criticism over other sales tactics. Direct-to-consumer advertising has drawn fire and
some companies are voluntarily restricting the practice. The industry's nearly 100,000 salespeople in the U.S. are facing resistance from doctors who complain about being besieged in their offices. Drug maker Wyeth plans to cut its main sales force, which calls on primary-care doctors, by as much as 30% this year.

Companies formerly curried favor with doctors by taking them on free golf outings or filling up their cars with a tank of gas in exchange for listening to a sales pitch. But a voluntary marketing code adopted by the largest drug companies three years ago barred such inducements. Hiring a doctor as a speaker and providing a free meal for the attendees is still acceptable -- and, data suggest, highly effective. An internal study done by Merck & Co. several years ago calculated the "return on investment" from doctor-led discussion groups was almost double the return on meetings led by the company's own sales force.

Those who question the talks say drug companies are bombarding doctors with one-sided information through the seemingly neutral medium of independent speakers who often have prestigious affiliations. "An awful lot of the doctors in the audience are naive about the fact that these are really sales talks," says Jerry Avorn, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and author of a recent book that criticized drug companies' marketing.

Also, speakers who make thousands of dollars in fees from drug companies aren't required to disclose their side job to patients, although they are expected to disclose their ties in scientific papers?

Write to Scott Hensley at scott.hens...@wsj.com and Barbara Martinez at barbara.marti...@wsj.com

THE NEW YORK TIMES Doctors' Links With Investor Matchmakers Raise Concerns By Stephanie Saul and Jenny Anderson August 16, 2005, p. A-1

At first, the calls seemed innocuous. Investment companies were offering Dr. Ronald B. Natale $200 or $300 for 15 minutes, asking that he discuss general trends in lung cancer, sometimes over the telephone. But Dr. Natale became suspicious as the money offers kept growing, just before he was to present the case for Iressa, a new lung cancer drug, to a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel in September 2002. Dr. Natale's access to research data on Iressa made him an attractive source for investment researchers seeking inside information. "Wow, they were offering $1,000, $1,500, for 30 minutes of my time," said Dr. Natale, a prominent researcher at Cedars-Sinai Comprehensive Cancer Center in Los Angeles. He said he routinely turned down offers to speak to investors.

While Dr. Natale has qualms, other doctors apparently do not. Nearly 10 percent of the nation's 700,000 doctors have signed up as consultants with a new segment of the investment industry - companies that act as the
Match.com of the investment world, according to an article in The Journal of the American Medical Association. For a fee, they arrange conversations between investors and leading professionals, experts or even employees of major companies.

Matching investors with doctors can raise particularly troubling questions. Physicians frequently serve as clinical researchers for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, testing new drugs. Inside knowledge about those tests, before it is publicly available, could be worth millions.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has now begun looking at whether doctors, participating in clinical trials, are accepting money to talk
to analysts and investors about the confidential results. Such a breach, under some circumstances, could be construed as a violation of insider trading law. Among the businesses that have emerged as matchmakers is Gerson Lehrman Group of New York. Founded in 1998, Gerson is the industry leader in connecting investors with specialists in fields ranging from Turkish cement to underwire brassieres. Gerson's 150,000 specialists include 60,000 physicians. Another company, Leerink Swann & Company of Boston, has a subsidiary that advertises a network of more than 11,500 medical professionals, including physicians, willing to talk to investors.

The idea is fairly new, but the business model has already come under
scrutiny. Even though the companies prohibit panelists from violating confidences or revealing proprietary information, such conversations carry the risk that participants will betray secrets. "The frequency of physician contact, this matrix or extraordinary network of physicians that were at the disposal of investment firms, is a setup for trouble," said Dr. Eric J. Topol of the Cleveland Clinic, who co-wrote the JAMA article, which appeared in June, exploring the growing relationships between physicians and investment companies. Dr. Topol has firsthand knowledge of the problem. Last year, he gave up his own $12,000-a-year position on a hedge fund advisory panel after concluding it created the appearance of impropriety.