The drug companies make payments to doctors who give lectures or do studies, and then precsribe the drugs.
While some of the payments in the article are substantial, most are quite small, the average being about $2000. The scale raises the questions, can docs be swayed for a few grand. The answer is yes-- even if the docs don't know it.
The Times quotes Dr. Steven E. Hyman, the provost of Harvard University and former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, who says: "There’s an irony that psychiatrists ask patients to have insights into themselves, but we don’t connect the wires in our own lives about how money is affecting our profession and putting our patients at risk.”
I have some experienec in this question in the administrative law area. In the Padberg case, I retained Prof. George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University, perhaps the world's leading expert in conflicts of interest. In a report filed in in the case, he wrote:
When decision makers receive benefits or even small gifts from interested parties, their judgments are subject to an unconscious and unintentional self-serving bias, even when they try to remain objective. When individuals have a stake in reaching a particular conclusion, they weigh arguments in a biased fashion that favors a particular conclusion. As much as they may try, individuals have proven unable to achieve neutrality or objectivity when they have a personal interest in arriving at a specific conclusion. Because bias induced by monetary interests is unconscious and unintentional, there is little hope in controlling it when monetary interests exist.
This case involved the bias not of doctors, but of administrataive law judges. But the principle is the same.
For more on Padberg, see Background Brief, Case File, and my Brief on the Corruption of the Judges.
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