Perks for Drug Pushers
August 23rd, 2008Via: Guardian:
Drug companies are spending millions of pounds every year on all-expenses-paid trips to conferences around the world for doctors and other hospital staff, in what critics say is a massive marketing exercise dressed up as medical education.
The Guardian can reveal the scale of pharmaceutical company sponsorship following an examination of the registers of gifts and donations to doctors that all hospitals are required to keep. They show considerable largesse – from drug companies regularly picking up hefty bills for travel to international conferences in Europe, Asia and America, to specialist nurses’ salaries, and weekly sandwich lunches for hospital staff training sessions.
All-expenses-paid trips to conferences in the US, Vietnam or Hungary are a regular feature of the registers, costing the companies up to £5,000 per doctor. Many of the declarations by doctors do not put a price on the trip. The total amounts received by staff at individual hospital trusts with complete registers are substantial – Sheffield’s staff received funding of more than £105,000 from pharmaceutical and medical devices companies in the 12 months to last June.
My sister works for a subcontractor of one of the pharmaceutical companies and I can corroborate the info here. She said that no expenses are spared when it comes to the doctors at these conventions. If a doctor wants a nine course meal at 3 am they get it. Just make sure to mush these meds.
Yep. If you’re a member of the laboring class in the US, you had best only go to the doctor for first-class, red-alert medical emergencies, even if you’re fortunate enough to have insurance from your work. Mostly these doctors are going to want to poor big-pharma medicines down your throat that might or might not work and that you probably won’t really be able to afford. Our prescription medicine prices are the highest in the world, attested to by the fact that even when insurance pays for half, the price you pay is still an outrage against basic decency.