Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Patients May Die When Doctors Moonlight as Big Pharma's "Key Opinion Leaders" | Truthout

1 comment:

Greg Pawelski said...

"Dozens of other doctors agreed to 'influence their colleagues to use Procrit' for unapproved indications such as cancer-related fatigue. One was Dr. Von Hoff, the director at the Arizona Cancer Center. He collected advisory fees and perks from not just Ortho, but from about 30 other pharmaceutical firms, earning directors' fees for sitting on several companies' boards. 'When I saw how many shares he owned in biotech and drug firms, my jaw dropped,' McClellan later said. Many others, like Dr. Jerome Groopman of Harvard Medical School, performed J&J-funded clinical trials. He was paid to sit on Procrit's 'fatigue' advisory board and was quoted often in The New York Times extolling the drug, according to public records."

In 2010, Dan Von Hoff got the Karnofsky award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), which is sort of a lifetime achievement award for clinical research. This is a nuclear explosion for clinical oncology. I'm wondering who was involved in the Harvard side of it? Interestingly, it is the highest levels of academia who are most tainted. One in particular, Dan Von Hoff. These ivory tower docs were the culprits. Unfortunately, this will probably play out as one more cudgel to beat the more reasonable and gentle practitioners, who either largely avoided such abuse or were led down the path by the scholars, who will themselves skip out unfazed.