Click here to read Greg’s previous day’s blog titled, “The Money Big Pharma Spends to Corrupt” plus a diagram that shows just how much money Big Pharma throws at buying influence and favour in the medical world in the USA.

Every day I get emails from people with Hepatitis C whose doctors refuse to monitor them during their treatment with generic Hep C meds like Harvoni.
Likewise doctors regularly refuse to write prescriptions for patients wanting to start generic treatment.
This happens all around the world but it is particularly an issue in the USA.

One of the reasons for this is that the doctors are scared of Big Pharma, the other reason is that they do not want to risk the fat pickings that Big Pharma offers them. Big Pharma gives doctors all kinds of free things from pens and note pads to trips overseas and BIG lumps of money.
Knowing just how generous Big Pharma is to those who do as they are told many doctors will not risk offending the powerful and ruthless rulers of Big Pharma.

The piece below was written by journalist Martha Rosenberg, it shows in great detail how Big Pharma has corrupted the medical world in the USA and these same practices are employed in all countries across the globe.

"Many doctors make a huge amount of money from Pharma by giving speeches promoting its drugs. The speech-givers, who sit on Pharma’s speakers’ bureaus, are considered “key opinion leaders,” capable of convincing other doctors of a drug’s benefits so they will then prescribe the drug.

According to ProPublica, Sujata Narayan, a family medicine doctor practicing in Stanford, CA earned an astounding $43.9 million promoting drugs for Pharma. Karen Underwood, a pediatric critical care doctor in Scottsdale, AZ received a walloping $28 million. Moreover, hospitals are also awash in Pharma money with the City Of Hope National Medical Center receiving $361 million and the Cleveland Clinic Foundation $22 million.

Big Pharma also pays doctors to conduct studies of its drugs often paying them for each subject they recruit and winning their loyalty because they are then familiar with the drug after monitoring subjects on it. A huge Pfizer trial of the drug Neurontin was conducted just this way charged Carl Elliot in the New York Times: 772 study investigators were recruited so they would personally prescribe the drug once they were familiar with it. The study was not conducted to establish effectiveness and safety and the joke was on them—and the public.

Traditionally in the USA , Big Pharma also paid for Continuing Medical Education courses, or CME, that are required for doctors to keep their state licenses and sometimes their insurance. Since the Pharma subsidized CMEs were “free,” doctors saved money they would have spent to enroll in a real course but of course had to listen to a Pharma sales pitch as a captive audience, instead.

Until transparency laws, CME course materials did not even hide Pharma funding. For example, a 2008 course called “Bipolar disorder: individualizing treatment to improve patient outcomes, part 2” was unabashedly taught by teachers funded by Abbott, Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca; GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen, Novartis, Pfizer, Wyeth, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Shire and four more drug companies"

Click here to view graphic work and data by US based researcher Rebecca Hill