Doctors: Under the drug industry's influence?

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO, Feb 3 (Reuters) - Reports of undisclosed financial ties between researchers and drugmakers have eroded public confidence, and restoring it will require an end to some "free" perks, health policy experts said on Tuesday.

Doctors may have to give up not just pens and prescription pads, but cozy seminars put on by drug companies in the guise of education, while the companies may need to give up direct-to-consumer ads, the experts wrote in a series of commentaries in the British Medical Journal.

Concern over research integrity in the United States has become more pronounced following accusations last year by Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley that prominent Harvard University psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Biederman and others failed to fully disclose payments from drug companies.

"We've seen a lot of transgressions -- people who have taken advantage of the system for their own self-aggrandizement or profit. It's got to stop," said Dr. Harlan Krumholz of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

One solution, offered by Dr. Marcia Angell of Harvard Medical School in Boston, is for doctors to keep industry at arms length. "I believe there should be no relationship between the drug industry and either prescribers or patients," wrote Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.

She argues that doctors should pay for their own continuing medical education instead of turning to drug companies for updates on prescription drugs. And she said professional organizations should pay for their own meetings and publications, instead of going "hat in hand to industry."

The meetings would be "less opulent," Angell said in a telephone interview.

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