The money in the pharmaceutical industry is staggering at times. I've had friends who used to work as sales reps in the pharmaceutical industry pushing various medicines and it was big money at its finest. The best reps received trips and lavish getaways at choice destinations around the world, and these perks were reserved for the reps who generated the most sales in their respective territories. Sales were based on the number of prescriptions that were written by the doctors in the territories.Needless to say, some of the sales reps did whatever was necessary to get the doctors in their territories to write more prescriptions for the drugs the reps were pushing - including offering things of consideration such as meals, trips, gift certificates or even ca$h. Just like payola in the music industry, except this was payola for people's health.
Perhaps your doctor has received monies from the pharmaceutical industry and you want to know this information. If so, you can check the ProPublica database to see if your doctor is listed as being a recipient of pharmaceutical monies. Please note that this database is not an exhaustive search, but rather, it is the information that has been disclosed by twelve (12) companies.
For decades, drug companies kept the names of their speakers -- and how much they paid them -- secret. But over the past two years, companies have begun posting this information on their web sites, some as the result of legal settlements with the federal government. ProPublica took these disclosures and assembled them into a single, comprehensive database that allows patients to search for their physician.Source: ProPublica
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