ProPublica: Searchable database allows you to input your doctors name and see if your doctor received drug company money.

Drug companies have long kept secret details of the payments they make to doctors for promoting their drugs. But seven companies have begun posting names and compensation on the Web, some as the result of legal settlements. ProPublica compiled these disclosures, totaling $258 million, into a single database that allows patients to search for their doctor. Receiving payments isn’t necessarily wrong, but it does raise ethical issues.

Drug companies say the millions of dollars they pay physicians for speaking and consulting justly compensates them for the laudable work of educating their colleagues.

But a series of lawsuits brought by former employees of those companies allege the money often was used for illegal purposes financially
rewarding doctors for prescribing their brand name medications.

In several instances, the ex-employees say, the physicians were told to push “off label” uses of the drugs those not approved by the U.S. regulators a marketing tactic banned by federal law.

Allegations in other whistleblower lawsuits provide a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the drug marketers:

Allergan, the maker of Botox, created faux advisory boards solely “to reward hundreds of its top injectors,” federal prosecutors charged this month. More than 200 doctors, for example, were put up at an oceanfront resort in Newport Beach, Calif., in 2005 and 2006 and paid $1,500 to listen to presentations, according to their sentencing memorandum.


Links: http://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/
http://www.propublica.org/article/lawsuits-say-pharma-illegally-paid-doctors-to-push-their-drugs