Pfizer Paid Doctors Millions To Push Their Drugs

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Pfizer Paid Doctors Millions To Push Their Drugs

April 2. 2010

This week it was confirmed, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals pimped out a number of hospitals, paying them and doctors $35 million to push their medicines. The Judiciary Report has seen firsthand how this can be detrimental and wrote about this issue last year in a series of articles ("Off Label Use", Good And Bad Pharmaceutical Drugs, Scientists Call For Drug Database and Manufacturer Knew Vioxx Was Bad).

It's dangerous paying doctors money to push certain medicines on patients, as that particular pharmaceutical drug may not be the best choice and do more harm than good.

Doctors should be free to customize treatment regarding what they deem best, on a patient by patient basis, not hock a certain drug in a category of illness, because a pharmaceutical giant is pressuring and paying them to do so. Patients lose out in the end. Each infirmed person needs the best medicine suited to their particular situation.

Drug companies should be barred from this practice when it is pay for play on a drug with serious side effects.

Pfizer Paid Doctors, Hospitals $35 Million

MARCH 31, 2010, 10:56 P.M. ET - Pfizer Inc. said Wednesday it paid about 4,500 doctors and hospitals $35 million during the second half of last year to study how the company's medicines work and to promote the treatments, in its first public disclosure of payments to the professionals and institutions that test and prescribe its products.

Drug companies have been under pressure from some members of Congress and physicians to reveal their payments. The health overhaul passed recently requires disclosures of certain physician payments starting in 2013. But Pfizer faced a more immediate deadline for revealing its payments: It agreed to ...

http://online.wsj.com