Conflicts of interest

I received the following today from Mike Palij at NYU. I think it is appropriate.
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An article in today's NY Times reports that U.S. feds will be
cracking down on physicians and surgeons for taking illegal
kickbacks from drug and medical device companies. One
example of this has been Eli Lilly's illegal marketing of Zyprexa
for which Lilly has agreed to pay a $1.4 billion fine. See:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/health/policy/04doctors.html?_r=2&scp=2&sq=gardiner%20harris&st=cse
or
http://tinyurl.com/bxbkf9

There are new regulations coming into place that would require
drug and device makers to make public (e.g., posted on a website)
what sorts of payments and gifts have given to physicians.
Minnesota has such a program already in place but complaints
about it have already started. Consider the following quote from
the NYT article:

|Dr. Richard Grimm, a Minnesota researcher, twice served on
|government-sponsored hypertension panels that create guidelines
|about when to prescribe blood pressure pills. But when state records
|revealed that he had earned more than $798,000 from drug companies
|from 1997 to 2005, invitations to serve on such panels dried up, he said.
|
|"There's this automatic assumption that if you make money from a drug
|company, you must be corrupt," Dr. Grimm said.

However, elsewhere in the article, the following view is presented:

|A common problem in illegal drug and device marketing cases is
|doctors' willingness to delude themselves into thinking that cash,
|lucrative trips and other kickbacks do not affect them, said Mr. Morris,
|the chief counsel.
|
|"Somehow physicians think they're different from the rest of us," Mr. Morris
|said. "But money works on them just like everybody else."