Spine Doctors Get Tough On Device Maker Payments « Medical Detox Programs in a stress-free environment

February 18, 2009

Spine Doctors Get Tough On Device Maker Payments

Filed under: pharmaceutical giants — Rod Malcolm @ 11:30 am

The North American Spine Society will sanction its 5,000 members who fail to disclose not just financial ties, but actual dollar amounts of payments from medical device-makers.

Ongoing Congressional investigations being led by Sen. Charles E. “Chuck” Grassley (R, IA) into academic and medical financial ties to medical device-makers have prompted the North American Spine Society to introduce stringent new financial transparency requirements from its 5,000 members.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the initiative “is a response to pressure from lawmakers, prosecutors and lawsuits by companies’ former employees. Prominent surgeons doing research have been found to have significant financial relationships — sometimes to the tune of millions of dollars — with medical-device firms.”

We’ve been following Sen. Grassley’s inquiries into how Big Pharma’s financial tentacles are wrapped around research, continuing education and marketing to physicians. This is the first major story we’ve seen concerning medical device makers.

The spine society will require researchers and consultants to disclose full details including dollar amounts of their financial ties to medical-device companies, or be subject to sanctions that can include suspension, expulsion or public letters of censure. The sanctions would have no effect on ability to practice, only on membership.

The spine society’s ethics-committee chairwoman, Marjorie Eskay-Auerbach, an orthopedic surgeon in Tucson, AZ, told the WSJ it became clear that more transparency is better, and that she doesn’t know of other professional groups or journals with similarly stringent disclosure rules. Whether mere disclosure is enough to deal with conflicts of interest, it’s at least a first step, she said.

Catherine DeAngelis, editor in chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association, said she knows of no other such policy. But she told the WSJ that she and other top medical-journal editors plan to discuss it at a June meeting.

The WSJ said that, according to a Senate committee, medical-implant makers Zimmer Holdings Inc., Stryker Corp., the DePuy orthopedics unit of Johnson & Johnson, and Biomet Inc. have paid more than $221 million to surgeon “consultants” in recent years.

Medtronic Inc. has been accused by former employees, and the government, of inducing surgeons to use its spine products through questionable payments. In 2006, the Minneapolis company agreed to pay $40 million to the feds to settle civil charges that it paid kickbacks to doctors.

Medical Detox Programs in a stress-free environment

February 18, 2009

Spine Doctors Get Tough On Device Maker Payments

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