Doctors' Conflicting Interests Can Cost Money and Lives, and Hinder Medical Discoveries

March 28, 2011— -- In recent months, the print media have once again outed another group of physicians who benefit from undisclosed financial renumeration from pharmaceutical companies, accompanied by serious conflicts of interest. One headline from The New York Times News Service read "California Docs Paid to Promote Drugs," while other news outlets carried similar stories.

The fact that doctors take money from pharmaceutical companies happens to be old news. But this time around, the docs in question come from Stanford University. Previous news stories reported that doctors receiving pharmaceutical funding hailed from Harvard, the University of Miami, the Medical College of Georgia and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.

More than a few of these doctors are psychiatrists who have received tax-supported, public National Institutes of Health and National Institute of Mental Health funding for clinical research, have participated in U.S. Food and Drug Administation advisory panels or have appeared on, or on behalf of, various not-for-profit psychiatric advocacy boards -- some of which are heavily supported by the manufacturers of psychiatric medications.

In 2006, my colleagues and I wrote a brief letter to the editor to the Journal of the American Medical Association, one of America's premier peer-reviewed medical journals. Our letter expressed concern about the lack of honest disclosure of conflicts by certain psychiatric authors in a previously published article.

Multiple authors had recommended specific antidepressant therapy but failed to reveal that they were being paid by multiple antidepressant manufacturers to speak, advocate and do research for the companies that sold the drugs.

During the review process, an associate editor at the journal asked the question (and inadvertently copied me on an email that had been sent to another associate editor), "What's the big deal? What's all this [expletive deleted] about conflicts of interest?"

Academic journals, heavily supported by advertising money, are biased and complicit in the conflict of interest fiasco.

Sometimes I wonder why I -- or anyone else for that matter -- should care about psychiatrists who pimp for drug companies. After all, physician spokespeople and drug manufacturers are capitalists, and capitalism is our economic cornerstone. Every day, any financial news consumer hears the refrain invoking the social advantages of free market capitalism. It is the mantra of a major financial television network. And even though I'm a psychiatrist, I'm also a capitalist, so why should I worry?