Docs Paid by #Pharma Promote Drugs Online without Disclosure of COI
Physicians across the United States routinely offer medical advice on social media — but often fail to mention that they have accepted tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars from the companies that make the prescription drugs they tout.
A STAT examination of hundreds of social media accounts shows that health care professionals virtually never note their conflicts of interest, some of them significant, when promoting drugs or medical devices on sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The practice cuts across all specialties.
Among the cases of note:
- Women’s health specialists who serve as consultants for the company that developed Addyi, the female libido drug, use Twitter to promote that medication and related treatments.
- A child psychiatrist featured on YouTube steers viewers to the website for Saphris, an antipsychotic drug made by Allergan, which has paid her to promote it.
- An internist posts on Facebook about the positive effects of a cholesterol drug manufactured by a company that paid him nearly $60,000.
There is no evidence any of these doctors meant to deceive or mislead patients. And they were not legally obligated to disclose payments from drug companies in their social media posts.
But the growing use of social media by medical professionals raises serious ethical questions — and makes it impossible for patients or other doctors to know whether a physician’s enthusiasm or disdain for any particular drug may have been influenced by payments from the pharmaceutical industry.
Some doctors say disclosure is impractical in the limited space that social media offers when they have financial ties with multiple drug makers. “It’s become very unwieldy and problematic and it’s ridiculous for a tweet,” said Dr. James Simon, a physician who frequently uses Twitter to promote drugs made by companies that have paid him as a consultant and promoter.
But Reuben Guttman, an attorney in Washington who specializes in food and drug law, said the system leaves patients vulnerable to misinformation.
“Doctors who accept these dollars and then turn around and promote on social media corrupt the market for honest medical information,” Guttman said. “And drug companies that pay these doctors are similarly poisoning the market for honest information.”
AMA guidelines -- Professionalism in the Use of Social Med (http://bit.ly/AMA-SMpolicy) -- do NOT address this issue at all. It's telling that the ads do not mention product names and comply with FDA regulations even though those regulations do not apply to physicians. It's as if pharma medical-legal depth have written these ads for their physician partners.