by Elizabeth B. Kim,
Cincinnati Enquirer
June 9, 2025
Joan Doyle trusts her doctors. Between her husband’s epilepsy and diabetes, her daughter’s Down syndrome and her own car accident years ago, the 65-year-old Sharonville resident and her family have relied on a whole host of doctors to guide them through new diagnoses and prescriptions. So when she searched her family’s doctors in Open Payments, a public database that shows which doctors have received money from Big Pharma, Doyle was curious about what she’d find. “Certainly none of my doctors are on this list,” she remembered thinking before searching the database. She was surprised. “Every single one of them,” Doyle said. “Everybody from our dentist to our family doctor to all of our ologists.” All 12 of the doctors Doyle searched accepted payments or in-kind forms of compensation from pharma or medical device companies between 2017 and 2023.
The total sum varied widely, from less than $300 for her OB-GYN to more than $150,000 for her husband’s oncologist. Payments like these are pervasive: A 2024 analysis found that more than half of doctors in the U.S. accepted a payment from a pharmaceutical or medical device company over the past decade. Most don’t earn millions of dollars … but research shows that when a doctor was bought a single meal of less than $20 by a drug company, they were up to twice as likely to prescribe the medication the company was marketing.
Note: 60% of U.S. doctors who shaped the DSM-5-TR—the “bible” of psychiatric diagnosis—received $14.2 million from the drug industry, raising concerns over conflicts of interest in psychiatric guidelines.For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on health and Big Pharma profiteering.
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