Have you ever wondered if doctors and other medical professionals receive money from big
pharmaceutical companies? Well they do. (I’ll show you how much soon). And in the name of
transparency, Medicines Australia are fairly open about it. According to their website,
“Our members discover, develop and manufacture prescription pharmaceutical products,
biotherapeutic products and vaccines”, and “Our members INVEST in Australian medical
research” – “invest” being the operative word. Their Class 1 members include,
AstraZeneca, Janssen, and Pfizer, just to name a few.
If you scroll up to the top of their website, click on the search button,
type in “disclosure”, press enter, and then click on the first result
“Transparency”. You can read all about their transparency if you want to,
but I’m interested in scrolling down to section 1. Payments to healthcare professionals. In there,
they state, “All payments are published to an online searchable database which
is available at disclosureaustralia.com.au”. And that’s what we’ll be clicking on today.
If you click on “Search For Your Healthcare Professional Now”,
you’re met with this screen. You can filter by State, Member Company, Reporting Period,
and so on. For this presentation, I’ll be grabbing all the data, noting that the data
is from May 2019 to April 2022. Click on “Search For Your Healthcare Professional”. You’ll see
there are literally hundreds of pages of data, and tens-of-thousands of results. As usual,
I will download the data and open it as a spreadsheet by clicking the Export button.
In the spreadsheet, you’ll see the company name, the date, the name of the healthcare professional,
their role, but the columns that I’m interested in are: Registration Fees,
Travel Costs, and Fees For Service. It should be noted that according to the Royal Australian
College of GPs (in 2019 before the pandemic I might add), there has been a 34.1% reduction
in disclosed spending by these companies in 2016, the year after changes were made to
the pharmaceutical industry’s codes of conduct. The changes have allowed companies to hide the
amount spent on food and beverages at events and for sponsored healthcare professionals.
“Even the provision of modest meals at such educational events hosted by pharmaceutical
companies can influence prescribing behaviour of healthcare professionals”, Dr Lisa Parker said.
A quick note on the data before I show you my results. Names for some doctors
have often been entered in inconsistently. For example, Westerman, David, Westerman,
David A., and Westerman, David Alan, I assume are the same doctor, so during my analysis, I
have grouped these like names. Apologies to these doctors if they are actually different people. We
can see that Dr Westerman has received quite a few payments from Pfizer, but we’ll get to that soon.
Firstly, How Much Did Big Pharma Pay Australian Doctors? Here’s an ordered list with the biggest
contributors at the top, noting that food and beverages are now no longer included as
mentioned before. Swiss-American multinational Novartis has paid the most to Australian health
professionals over the last three years or so spending over $4.4 million. Coming in second
and third are Pfizer and AstraZeneca. at 3.6 million and $2.8 million respectively. These
are all legal payments, so don’t worry, there are no conflicts of interest [clears throat].
Here’s a list of doctors who received over $100,000 (remembering that I grouped
like names). Dr Danny Liew received over $378,000, while Doctors Andrew Sindone and
David Westerman received over $200,000 a piece. Of these amounts, this is how much each doctor
received from Pfizer. As we can see, Dr Liew and Dr Westerman received most of their money
from Pfizer. I’m not suggesting anything here, I’m just showing you the published numbers.
Some of these doctors have defended their payments in the media. Professor Danny Liew
is actually the Dean of Medicine at the Adelaide Medical School. The University
of Adelaide responded on his behalf stating, “The $369,000 from Pfizer was paid to Monash
University not him personally, and he maintained independence from prescribing Pfizer products”.
Sydney cardiologist, Dr Andrew Sindone, who received more than $231,000 from
multiple pharmaceutical companies has stated that, “The fees are for work,
many hundreds of hours of work and there is no possibility of any bias,
it’s about teaching and educating GPs and medical students. My goal is to help doctors,
help patients. Its fee for service. I often don’t know which pharmaceutical company is involved,
it’s run by middle men. They are all scientific meetings, I’m not promoting medicines.”
And lastly, Perth dermatologist Dr Kurt Gebauer “Generally what comes to me is
less than a plumber charged me last week to come to my house at $400 bucks an hour.
It’s not worth it both from a financial point of view, when I could be sitting in my office
building for $600 to $800 an hour”. Pfizer, you really have to pay these doctors more!
“There has got to be a conflict of interest of some sort, because there’s no such thing
as no conflict of interest. There’s always a certain amount of manipulation,
protective manipulation that goes on even if it is subliminal. In Australia it’s the government
that decides what medicine gets funded and I don’t have any involvement in that.”
Anyway, they’re the numbers for you. What do you
think? Is it okay that doctors are receiving big bucks from big pharma?