The .Plan

Shocking, the idea that drug companies would try to influence physician prescribing behavior. Shocking.

Dr. DeAngelis, who has publicly feuded with Dr. Stossel in the letters column of The Washington Post, argues that she does not hate the drug companies, whom she has called “for-profit people who do God’s work.”

“If it weren’t for them,” she said, “we’d still be taking my grandmother’s brioschi,” a cure-all she was regularly given as a child.

But she says pharmaceutical companies do try to corrupt researchers by asking them to put their names on ghost-written articles and by using journals like hers to implicitly endorse their products.

Dr. DeAngelis will not let companies buy advertisements in issues in which their products are studied, and when she attends a medical dinner and discovers a drug company has paid for it, she said: “I don’t eat. It kills me, but I only drink water. Tap water.”

That is one of her relatively mainstream views. By contrast, she wants it to be a crime for doctors to accept any gift from drug company representatives. “A lot of doctors are stupid in that they don’t realize that by taking a pizza or going to a ballgame or letting a drug rep bring doughnuts to the office, they’re being bought,” she said.
–Donald McNeil, “Tough-Talking Journal Editor Faces Accusations of Leniency”, New York Times, August 1, 2006