Drug firms accused of bribing doctors

Pharmaceutical companies are bribing doctors to prescribe their drugs and suppressing negative research, a leading Australian emergency medicine specialist says.

Professor George Jelinek, who will address the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine conference in Wellington today, told The Dominion Post it was time for the medical profession to reject "inducements" from pharmaceutical companies.

"We are intelligent people and we don't like to accept we could be influenced by advertising and marketing - but studies have shown it does influence prescribing patterns," said Professor Jelinek, who heads the emergency medicine department at the University of Western Australia.

Surveys show almost 95 per cent of specialists have accepted pharmaceutical companies' largesse, from stationery to lucrative speakers' fees to attend international conferences.

Drug companies spend about 36 per cent of their budget on marketing - more than three times what they invest in research and development.

Professor Jelinek admitted accepting funding from drug companies in the past, but said he gradually became aware of the consequences in recent years, as editor of the journal Emergency Medicine.

Analyses have found drug company-sponsored studies were consistently "less robust" than independently funded research.

A survey of 823 Australian specialists who had published research sponsored by drug companies found that, in one in eight cases, the company had written the first draft of their papers. Many reported that drug companies had asked them to downplay or cut negative findings.

Professor Jelinek said there was increasing discomfort among medical journal editors about the "corrupting" influence of drug companies.

- © Fairfax NZ News