The Washington Post featured an article around physicians working with industry and how patients should ask their physicians about those relationships titled: Probing Doctors' Ties to Industry
In the article they make the claim that 94% of physicians have relationships with industry and question if patients can trust physicians.
The fact that doctor’s work with industry does not mean conflict. It means that physicians not only understand the types of treatments and medicines they provide (from the experience they gain with industry), but that they also have worked with those drugs and devices, and have conducted research and clinical trials with them.
Conversely, while consumer surveys might show what the publics opinion about physician-industry relationships are in general, these surveys fall short of the most important question: whether any sort of relationship or gifts has any impact whatsoever on the effectiveness and efficiency of the treatment patients receive.
A better question that could have asked is: If your physician worked with industry, which gave them the necessary research and clinical experience with a drug or device he or she may prescribe you, would you be more or less confident in your physician? We would hope any reasonable person would choose a physician who has experience with a treatment—especially one created by industry—verses a physician playing “Operation.”
Critics like Daniel Carlat, a Massachusetts-based psychiatrist, think patients should bring up industry payments with their physicians indirectly by mentioning the media. That idea however is almost as ridiculous as Mr. Carlat himself. The media has one goal: to make money whatever way they can. Unfortunately, the media’s biased nature of reporting physician payment industry has a long record of jumping to conclusions and selectively choosing information to portray legal activities as unethical. Industry’s main goal is to help patients.
Furthermore, the responsibility of any “physician is to facilitate the development of new therapies by "working with many pharmaceutical companies.” The ultimate goal of any physician as well as the industry is to treat patients because "The trust of our patients is so important.” Specifically, doctors “never want a patient to not take a medicine because they are concerned a physician might have a financial interest."
That is why representatives from the Association of Clinical Researchers and Educators (ACRE) stated in the article that "Once the information is out there . . . patients will realize that there are a lot of physicians involved in [relationships with industry] for the betterment of patients," said Rafael Fonseca, a hematologist and the deputy director of the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center, as well as a member of the steering committee for ACRE. Some physicians, like Avi B. Markowitz, a medical oncologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, who is also on the steering committee of ACRE, believe that “doctors are entitled to their privacy.”
Ultimately, Physician and industry relationships are necessary, and good for research. Moreover, as Steve Nissen, chairman of the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic put it perfectly: "We can't lose sight of the fact that it is potentially beneficial [to the public] for industry to interact with physicians, because someone needs to develop these drugs."
We need to focus on developing drugs and educating those who prescribe them on the right patients to use them on. In the end the physician and patient both benefit from those new therapies and education around them.