When doctors go bad they leave money trail

This is an essential article for everyone to read. Congratulations to Senator Grassley for his fine work, diligence and ethics. This is not just a matter of many, MANY doctors across the USA taking money on the sly from drug companies to peddle their goods. That's bad enough, but at the point that these bloated doctors get accustomed to million dollar lifestyles, they stop prescribing the correct remedies to people who suffer from mental disorders and other illnesses or diseases.

No wonder it seems that every doctor has become a mindless drug pusher, even plying children with dangerous drugs. I've wondered why this is, and in part I blamed the insurance companies who prefer to reimburse for a drug, let's say, rather than a treatment, such as AA or other "talking cure." Also, valid, cheap traditional drugs, who were once marvelous discoveries have been pushed aside and no longer prescribed so that the more expensive and extreme new drugs can be pushed. So now the picture has become, sad to see but necessary, clearer.

I realized, painfully, years ago that the doctor is not the patient's friend, or even the benevolent provider of what is best for the patient. Now it's time for the rest of the country to realize this. Hopefully even the idiots who have enabled greed to replace ethics and good diagnosis will realize that they and their own families are also suffering from the stinking decay of medical practice and ethics. What goes around comes around, and these same creeps are misdiagnosing your own families and loved ones.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/22/health/22radio.html?hp

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The psychiatrist and radio host, Dr. Frederick K. Goodwin, is the latest in a series of doctors and researchers whose ties to drug makers have been uncovered by Senator Charles E. Grassley, a Republican from Iowa.

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In a program broadcast on Sept. 20, 2005, Dr. Goodwin warned that children with bipolar disorder who are left untreated could suffer brain damage, a controversial view. “But as we’ll be hearing today,” Dr. Goodwin reassured his audience, “modern treatments — mood stabilizers in particular — have been proven both safe and effective in bipolar children.”

That very day, GlaxoSmithKline paid Dr. Goodwin $2,500 to give a promotional lecture for its mood stabilizer drug, Lamictal, at the Ritz Carlton Golf Resort in Naples, Fla. Indeed, Glaxo paid Dr. Goodwin more than $329,000 that year for promoting Lamictal, records given Congressional investigators show.

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Mr. Grassley is systematically asking some of the nation’s leading researchers and doctors to provide their conflict-of-interest disclosures, and Mr. Grassley is comparing those documents with records of actual payments from drug companies. The records often conflict, sometimes starkly.

In October, Mr. Grassley revealed that Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff of Emory University, one of the nation’s most influential psychiatric researchers, earned more than $2.8 million in consulting arrangements with drug makers from 2000 to 2007, failed to report at least $1.2 million of that income to his university and violated federal research rules. As a result, the National Institutes of Health suspended a $9.3 million research grant to Emory and placed restrictions on other grants, and Dr. Nemeroff relinquished his chairmanship of Emory’s psychiatry department.

In June, the senator revealed that Harvard University’s Dr. Joseph Biederman, whose work has fueled an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic medicines in children, had earned at least $1.6 million from drug makers between 2000 and 2007, failed to report most of this income to his university, and may have violated federal and university research rules.