Doctors Reaping Millions for Use of Anemia Drugs

Source: ALEX BERENSON and ANDREW POLLACK

Two of the world’s largest drug companies are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to doctors every year in return for giving their patients anemia medicines, which regulators now say may be unsafe at commonly used doses.

The payments are legal, but very few people outside of the doctors who receive them are aware of their size. Critics, including prominent cancer and kidney doctors, say the payments give physicians an incentive to prescribe the medicines at levels that might increase patients’ risks of heart attacks or strokes.

Industry analysts estimate that such payments — to cancer doctors and the other big users of the drugs, kidney dialysis centers — total hundreds of millions of dollars a year and are an important source of profit for doctors and the centers. The payments have risen over the last several years, as the makers of the drugs, Amgen and Johnson & Johnson, compete for market share and try to expand the overall business.

Neither Amgen nor Johnson & Johnson has disclosed the total amount of the payments. But documents given to The New York Times show that at just one practice in the Pacific Northwest, a group of six cancer doctors received $2.7 million from Amgen for prescribing $9 million worth of its drugs last year.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/business/09anemia.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

If I can't audit a company that I own stock in or my husband holds in his retirement for example, why in hell is it legal for a doctor to receive so much as a post it note from a salesman?

Pure greed.

There is really no alternative to these drugs outside of a blood transfusion, which would immediately knock him off the transplant list.

Yes, they are very, very expensive, but the results are dramatic. They stimulate my son's bone marrow to immediately start manufacturing red blood cells, very much saving his life.

My son's nephrologist is very, very careful about his doses and only uses the bare minimum required. For my son, the whole object is to avoid a blood transfusion (because then he would be disqualified for transplant).

The group that is at most risk for side effects are non-dialysis cancer patients.