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Friday, May 30, 2003Warner-Lambert paid dozens of doctors tens of thousands of dollars each to speak to other physicians about how Neurontin, an epilepsy drug, could be prescribed for more than a dozen other medical uses that had not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The top speaker for Neurontin, Dr. B. J. Wilder, a former professor of neurology at the University of Florida, received more than $300,000 for speeches given from 1994 to 1997, according to a court filing. Six other doctors, including some from top medical schools, received more than $100,000 each. And that, in a nut shell, is why I don’t go to lectures sponsored solely by drug companies. Who can trust someone who’s making the equivalent of a general practioner’s salary just by shilling for the pharmaceutical industry? But wait a minute, one guy’s wife says he was free to say whatever he wanted to say: Dr. Wilder, who received the most money for speaking about Neurontin, could not be reached yesterday. His wife, Eve Wilder, said that Warner-Lambert had never told her husband what to say. "He had total freedom on all the education programs he put on," Mrs. Wilder said. Well, up to a point. It’s probably true that no one sat down with Dr. Wilder and gave him a lecture outline, but you can bet if he failed to mention Neurontin or mentioned it in an ambivalent or uncomplimentary way, he wouldn’t be invited to give any more lectures. I know a lecturer in geriatrics who was invited to speak on Alzheimer’s by a drug company for a handsome fee. He, too, was told he had complete freedom of content. In his lecture, he called Alzheimer’s drugs “fancy bug spray” (they’re cholinesterase inhibitors) and said they don’t really make that much of a difference in outcome or quality of life. The drug reps at the talk were livid and he was never asked to speak again. But this is probably the most shameful practice of all: Other doctors were paid to write reports on how Neurontin worked for a handful of their patients, the court papers said. Still others were paid to prescribe Neurontin in doses far exceeding the approved levels as part of a clinical trial that Warner-Lambert created to market the medicine, according to the court papers, which are new documents filed in the lawsuit by the whistle-blower. At least in a lecture you know who’s paying the guy's salary. Disguising sales promotion as research destroys the credibility of all industry-funded research. posted by Sydney on 5/30/2003 08:20:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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