What's up with Johnson & Johnson on the HuffPo?

[smylei9]

Sept 22, 2015 20:06:49 GMT -5 WanderingWinoZ said:

I guess this is what I've been seeing...
www.cbsnews.com/news/does-your-doc-have-ties-to-big-pharma-how-youll-be-able-to-find-out/

Big pharma routinely pays doctors to promote its products, but soon patients will be able to get a clearer picture about a doctor's possible connections to the companies that make the drugs they may prescribe.
The Affordable Care Act includes the Sunshine Act, which requires all pharmaceutical and medical device companies to publicly report all payments to doctors more than $10, according to Charlie Ornstein, a senior editor for the independent, non-profit newsroom ProPublica. The information will be made available in the fall of 2014. "This means patients, for the first time, will have a full window into how closely their doctors work with a pharmaceutical industry and be able to raise this with their doctors if they have questions," he said.

The practice of pharmaceutical companies working with doctors to develop new medications to treat conditions and help promote those medications has been in place for decades, but Ornstein, who is investigating this practice, said, "The promotion part has gotten a lot of attention in recent years because drug companies have paid hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars to settle lawsuits that have accused them of improper marketing and giving kickbacks to doctors."

Ornstein continued, "It's illegal to give kickbacks to a doctor to prescribe drugs, but it is legal to give money to doctors to help promote your drug. Some doctors make tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year beyond their normal practice just for working with the industry."

This is referring to doctors, often specialists, who give educational lectures over lunch or dinner. Honestly, there isn't really a lot of "promotion" going on. The FDA approves a slide deck for the product being promoted and the speaker has to read the slides word for word. If they deviate off the slide or talk about off label use of the product, we have to turn them into the compliance department. The majority of the slides in the deck are safety slides...side effects, warnings, precautions, etc. If an attendee asks an off label question, the speaker has to tell them that it is off label and they can't answer it. These dinners are for doctors or mid levels who at e expected to be familiar with that class of drugs. No guests are allowed, meaning the attendees are not allowed to bring their spouse. As you can imagine, these dinners are not well attended so I personally don't do them.