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Sunshine Act shenanigans
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The federal government released a gusher of financial information regarding payments to doctors and educational institutions from pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers.
These huge numbers grabbed equally huge headlines: “$3.5 billion in the last months of 2013 alone.”
Not unlike the Medicare payments, data dumping the raw numbers just doesn’t make a ton of sense.
One doctor at Louisiana State University was tagged with more than $10,000 in food and beverages for that short time period. Your first reaction is probably, “I want to drink wine with that guy!” Just a tiny bit of research, though, and you’ll learn that all of the food for the entire residency program there is attributed to his name. No longer a very sexy story, eh?
It’s hard for me to get too excited about this list and disclosure. Heck, I can’t even find myself —not that my numbers are significant in any way. I’d like to suggest, however, that any of you who’ve had the odd Jimmy John’s or even the occasional fancy bottle of wine take the same approach.
The rightfully famous Jack T. Holladay, MD, MSEE, FACS, is on the list, and he hasn’t practiced clinical medicine since 2010. Tough to have your clinical decisions influenced by company money when you don’t make any clinical decisions. It’s hard to place too much emphasis on numbers with no context.
The equally famous and, in my honest opinion, irreplaceable Richard L. Lindstrom, MD, is surely on that list, too. Dr. Lindstrom is a valued consultant for pretty much every important company any of us knows.
We all need to hope that this kind of stuff doesn’t make Dr. Lindstrom and his very small group of peers reconsider their place at the intersection between company and clinic. If that were to occur, we — as doctors and patients, alike — would be poorer for that.