The Doctor, Patient and Pharmaceutical Companies

CNN Health posted an Article called "Does your doc get money from drug companies?". I've always wondered that same question. Many times visiting my Primary Care Physician I've seen the well dressed Pharmaceutical Rep with the very thick briefcase filled with samples. Thinking to myself "How do the doctors benefit from these interruptions in their office filled to capacity with impatient patients." There is a website called "ProPublica" that created a project called "Dollars for Docs" which reveals that "$258 million compensation from several companies went to health care providers in 2009 and 2010". This did not only include Physicians but Nurses and Pharmacists were also on the list according to ProPublica. ProPublica's database allows you to check if your Physician received any of this money. I went online and checked if my Physician was on the list and he was not.

According to another article written by Tom Detzel "About the Dollars for Docs data" this information is not easy to acquire. There is only a handful of Pharmaceutical Companies that are sharing this information. Beginning in 2013 all drug companies will have to report this information to the federal government.
Dollars for Docs is meant to be an educational tool. Patients can use this data to be informed and question their physicians on the drugs they are prescribing. If your doctor is on the list you may wonder if your on any of the drugs influenced by the Pharmaceutical Company. If your doctor is not on the list you can talk to them about it. You can also ask your Doctor if they've had any financial relationships with the pharmaceutical company.

There have been numerous lawsuits stating that drug companies illegally paid doctors to prescribe their drug from past employees who are spilling the beans.

These days it seems as if there is always a dollar assigned to healthcare. I remember listening to a radio show about this woman in a small town curing numerous people of cancer and one day she said these mysterious men came into her clinic and offered her a million dollars to sell her ingredients to the herbs she was using. She refused because they could not promise her that the treatment of these drugs would be free. I found her to be a true pioneer in the drug patient relationship. I understand if people don't get sick the pharmaceutical companies will not get rich but there should be a better way. We've become so dependent on fixing what is broken instead of preventing it from breaking in the first place.