Drug Research and Potential Conflict of Interest
The Washington Post examined 73 studies over a one year period in the New England Journal of Medicine. Of those 73 studies 60 were funded by a drug company, 50 were co-written by people who worked for drug companies and 37 had lead authors, generally professors, who had in the past received funds from drug companies for consulting, speaking or doing research.
Doctors are Less Likely to Trust Big Pharma Research
Do doctors trust the research sponsored by Pharmaceutical companies? The Atlantic reports on a study from Harvard Medical school asking physicians to rate the credibility of research abstracts, which varied only in who they were attributed to. Attributions included National Institutes of Health findings, others were listed as drug company experiments. The authors found that doctors were more likely to distrust reports from drug companies. The doctors said they were only half as willing to prescribe drugs promoted in big pharma studies as those mentioned in NIH reports.