How Much Did Big Pharma Pay Doctors?

Have you ever wondered if doctors and other medical professionals receive money from big pharmaceutical companies? Well they do. (I’ll show you how much soon). And in the name of transparency, Medicines Australia are fairly open about it. According to their website, “Our members discover, develop and manufacture prescription pharmaceutical products, biotherapeutic products and vaccines”, and “Our members INVEST in Australian medical research” – “invest” being the operative word. Their Class 1 members include, AstraZeneca, Janssen, and Pfizer, just to name a few.

If you scroll up to the top of their website, click on the search button, type in “disclosure”, press enter, and then click on the first result “Transparency”. You can read all about their transparency if you want to, but I’m interested in scrolling down to section 1. Payments to healthcare professionals. In there, they state, “All payments are published to an online searchable database which is available at www.disclosureaustralia.com.au ”. And that’s what we’ll be clicking on today.

If you click on “Search For Your Healthcare Professional Now”, you’re met with this screen. You can filter by State, Member Company, Reporting Period, and so on. For this presentation, I’ll be grabbing all the data, noting that the data is from May 2019 to April 2022. Click on “Search For Your Healthcare Professional”. You’ll see there are literally hundreds of pages of data, and tens-of-thousands of results. As usual, I will download the data and open it as a spreadsheet by clicking the Export button.

In the spreadsheet, you’ll see the company name, the date, the name of the healthcare professional, their role, but the columns that I’m interested in are: Registration Fees, Travel Costs, and Fees For Service. It should be noted that according to the Royal Australian College of GPs (in 2019 before the pandemic I might add), there has been a 34.1% reduction in disclosed spending by these companies in 2016, the year after changes were made to the pharmaceutical industry’s codes of conduct. The changes have allowed companies to hide the amount spent on food and beverages at events and for sponsored healthcare professionals. “Even the provision of modest meals at such educational events hosted by pharmaceutical companies can influence prescribing behaviour of healthcare professionals”, Dr Lisa Parker said.

A quick note on the data before I show you my results. Names for some doctors have often been entered in inconsistently. For example, Westerman, David, Westerman, David A., and Westerman, David Alan, I assume are the same doctor, so during my analysis, I have grouped these like names. Apologies to these doctors if they are actually different people. We can see that Dr Westerman has received quite a few payments from Pfizer, but we’ll get to that soon.

Firstly, How Much Did Big Pharma Pay Australian Doctors? Here’s an ordered list with the biggest contributors at the top, noting that food and beverages are now no longer included as mentioned before. Swiss-American multinational Novartis has paid the most to Australian health professionals over the last three years or so spending over $4.4 million. Coming in second and third are Pfizer and AstraZeneca. at 3.6 million and $2.8 million respectively. These are all legal payments, so don’t worry, there are no conflicts of interest [clears throat].

Here’s a list of doctors who received over $100,000 (remembering that I grouped like names). Dr Danny Liew received over $378,000, while Doctors Andrew Sindone and David Westerman received over $200,000 a piece. Of these amounts, this is how much each doctor received from Pfizer. As we can see, Dr Liew and Dr Westerman received most of their money from Pfizer. I’m not suggesting anything here, I’m just showing you the published numbers.

Some of these doctors have defended their payments in the media. Professor Danny Liew is actually the Dean of Medicine at the Adelaide Medical School. The University of Adelaide responded on his behalf stating, “The $369,000 from Pfizer was paid to Monash University not him personally, and he maintained independence from prescribing Pfizer products”.

And lastly, Perth dermatologist Dr Kurt Gebauer “Generally what comes to me is less than a plumber charged me last week to come to my house at $400 bucks an hour. It’s not worth it both from a financial point of view, when I could be sitting in my office building for $600 to $800 an hour”. Pfizer, you really have to pay these doctors more! “There has got to be a conflict of interest of some sort, because there’s no such thing as no conflict of interest. There’s always a certain amount of manipulation, protective manipulation that goes on even if it is subliminal. In Australia it’s the government that decides what medicine gets funded and I don’t have any involvement in that.”

What do you think? Is it okay that doctors are receiving big bucks from big pharma?

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