25 January 10 - 05:19Because Marketing Drugs Pays More Than Being a Doctor.
It's frightening to consider that so many "Experts In Their Field" really weren't actually in "their field" to begin with. Harvard, Brigham & Women's Doctor Paid by GlaxoSmithKline - Health Blog - WSJStarting this year, some high-profile Boston hospitals put new rules in place that prohibited their docs from being paid by drug companies to give speeches. One doc recently left one of the hospitals — and a job as an instructor at Harvard med school — in order to keep getting paid by the industry, the Boston Globe reports. GlaxoSmithKline recently reported its payments to doctors for the second quarter of last year. One doc — Lawrence M. DuBuske, an allergy and asthma specialist affiliated with Brigham & Women’s Hospital — was paid $99,375 during those three months. DuBuske recently “made decision between terminating the relationship with Glaxo and terminating his relationship with the Brigham, to do the latter,’’ an official at Partners HealthCare, a health system that includes the Brigham, told the Globe. One other doctor affiliated with the system has also left at least partly because of the new rules, but that doc hasn’t been identified, the Globe says. DuBuske didn’t return calls from the Globe. We tried to reach him this morning through the Immunology Research Institute of New England, a nonprofit he directs, but we haven’t heard back. We’ve been reporting for a while on moves to limit — or at least add transparency to — ties between doctors and the drug and device industries. Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Merck and Medtronic have all said they’ll start reporting at least some payments to doctors. And some lawmakers have been pushing to require broad reporting of payments by the industry.
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