Doctors who take money from Pharma Reps (anti-chemo post)

MmeJ · July 2016

If you're at a 100% publicly-funded institute (are there still any around in the U.S.?) your questions should be welcome.

If, however, this is a corporation, don't be surprised - if you push them - if they tell you how they get their funding and how they compensate their docs is none of your business. If they're publicly traded, you can read their annual reports.

And I would suggest that people who are trying to rake "BIG PHARMA" over the coals here look at the entities that have sponsored/purchased advertising on this web site over the years.

dragonsnake · July 2016

I'm a researcher who takes money from private companies for research and consulting. I'm not in medical field. Delivering the unbiased and experimentally supported result is a matter of my reputation. No amount of money will make me to deliver a result that the company wants rather than what I found. Working in Academia, I'm paid my regular salary. All my research findings belong to my university, and I do not profit from it. Research money that I get are spent to purchase some release time from teaching, so I can do research, to purchase the equipment, and to pay student or postdoc assistants. When I worked for a research university, I was not paid more than my salary, but my principle investigator was occasionally paid a summer salary, (normally, professors are paid for 9 out of 12 month a year). However, many of professors I know are opting out of their summer salaries in order to support post-docs and graduate students, otherwise the students would have no means to support themselves. University have to spend more than three times than that of a yearly salary of a postdoc in order to cover his/her indirect expenses and benefits, so I had to raise more than $100, 000 in grants in order to stay employed by the research university in the late 90s.

My problem with medical research is that it is customary to discard the outliers and other cases that do not nicely align with what is expected in order for data to look good. I observed this being done routinely as my mother is in the medical research field, and does both basic and clinical research. Because of the complexity of the biological phenomena it's also impossible to design a clean experiment or a clinical study. Add to it an occasional sloppiness of research assistants and poor skills in working with equipment that needs regular calibration, and you can see why I have low regard for biological and medical research. Also, if someone works for a private company, they are under pressure to deliver what company managements wants. This is why I do not work for a private company, but just consult as an independent researcher.

cb123 · July 2016

Thank you DragonSnake,

There are moral people and people who don't mind if they slip into the grey areas in every industry. I find medicine to be an industry with a very high level of morality as opposed to say, the mortgage industry. I tried to explain, on another thread, that there are private labs and non-profits but I was shouted down by people letting me know that those places accept funding from big pharma.

It's not the research and researchers that I'm concerned with, it's the common practice of big pharma buying doctors in one form or another. I don't like it when they buy politicians either. They have the money, they're making the rules of the industry.

My medical Oncologist has heretofore not been a researcher. All of a sudden she's been given $13k. I understand that doctors can be both researcher and doctor, and maybe she has some pet project that's finally coming to fruition. She had every opportunity to tell me during our discussion.

I don't like doctors who take the money, it makes me question their motives when suggesting treatment. And, I don't trust people who lie to me.

When I say "doctors", I mean someone who holds my life in their hands. Someone whose decisions I have to live with the outcomes of and be comfortable with, someone who sees me naked. I cannot put my life in the hands of someone who may be operating under the influence of cash.

Maybe I'm just being old fashioned or stubborn or both. I need a doctor I can trust.

DragonSnake, I wish you every success in your research and I hope lots of large grants come to your University from big pharma or anywhere else.

cb

PS For those people who think $13,000 dollars is a pittance? I have wiring instructions at the ready and will happily accept your pittance any day of the week. Clearly it was not a pittance to my doctor. She seemed to want it for some reason. It's amazing to me how much you can buy a doctor for these days. The first MO seemed to be enjoying his $2,000 consultation fees. You would think they'd be more responsive to the patients paying a $20,000 chemo bill - or is that just pittance as well?

Momine · July 2016

My surgeon is both doctor and researcher. He headed the Greek or Euro arm of the big study a few years back that compared the efficacy of AIs and tamoxifen. His being a researcher has worked to my advantage more than once.

Doctors who take money from Pharma Reps (anti-chemo post)

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