The Hidden Costs of Financial Conflicts of Interest in Medicine

Financial Conflicts of Interest in Medicine*

We use the geographic distance between a doctor’s office and drug company headquarters to instrument for the likelihood of pecuniary transfers, such as meals or speaking fees. Doctors tilt prescriptions in favor of the paying firm’s drugs, shifting away from both branded and generic substitutes. Larger transfers cause larger shifts in prescriptions. We explore two potential explanations: 1) per...

Financial conflicts of interest in psychiatry FORUM: FINANCIAL CONFLICTS OF INTEREST IN PSYCHIATRY

The proliferating connections between physicians and the pharmaceutical industry have brought the credibility of clinical medicine to an unprecedented crisis (1). The public seems to be increasingly skeptical of clinical medicine, since corporate actions that have placed profit over public health have become regular news in the media (2). Medical journals have been defined by a former editor as...

Clarifying the costs of conflicts of interest.

Financial conflicts of interest in science.

This Article proposes a new direction for addressing financial conflicts of interest, which plague biomedical research and threaten scientific integrity. This Article descriptively states the controversy surrounding financial conflicts of interest by explaining how these conflicts arise and the damage that can be created as a result. By describing the scientific process, the Article explains th...

Conflicts of interest in medicine and science.

Doctors, medical institutions, and governments themselves have been forced to recognize that conflicts of interest are beginning to shake public faith in the medical profession. Some of these conflicts have led to corruption on a gigantic scale, most notably the revelation that the fraudulent author of the scare over mumps, measles, and rubella vaccine which began in the UK was being funded by ...