Drug Company Payments Still a Public Secret

March 21, 2007
Drug Company Payments Still a Public Secret

March 21, 2007 — Despite laws created to specifically identify the financial gifts doctors receive from pharmaceutical companies, major obstacles remain in providing that information to the public.

In a first of its kind study from the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers looked at the records from these two states from 2002 to 2004 to examine how their laws have been executed.

Surprisingly, their findings reveal these payments often involve substantial sums, and the details of the transactions remain vague or unavailable.

"What we really found was laws aren't working," says study author Joseph Ross, an instructor in the department of geriatrics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

"We knew there would be substantial sums of money changing hands between doctors and companies," he says. "What was surprising was how poorly information was made available to the public, to researchers, to anyone."