IT’S A bountiful life for many an Australian specialist doctor. Dinners at Sydney’s finest restaurants. Business- class airfares and a week in New Orleans, Amsterdam or Atlanta. Tickets to Jose Carreras concerts and a dinner cruise, and time for a spot of golf. No need to reach for the wallet. It’s all absolutely free.

More than half of Australia’s physicians are “confident engagers” with the pharmaceutical industry, recent evidence to the Federal Court shows. They’re very comfortable receiving big pharma’s gifts of travel, entertainment and a little “education” - drug company information on new medications. A patient’s disease no longer determines which pill gets popped; commerce firmly guides the doctor’s arm when reaching for the prescription pad.

Here’s how it works, says Ian Haines, an oncologist with Melbourne’s Cabrini Hospital. Drug companies will fund research in various countries. They’ll pick the results they want and bury the other studies. The medical researchers lucky enough to have their results anointed will be paid by drug companies to travel and spread the word. “In medical publications, a lot of the authors now are employees of drug companies,” Haines says. “We never saw that 10 years ago.”

Sometimes specialists in their field have their expenses picked up just to sit in the audience and hear these filtered views. In June 2004, for instance, Haines accepted sponsorship from Novartis Pharmaceuticals to attend a scientific meeting in New Orleans. Haines received a $10,000 business-class airfare, five days in the Hampton Inn in downtown New Orleans - valued at $2000 - lunch and dinner each day, and day excursions worth about $1000. All for free. He didn’t even have to present a paper.

But for Haines, enough was enough when Novartis sent him a $3000 cheque last year and an invitation to another scientific meeting in Atlanta. He banked the money but had a change of heart. Haines made out a cheque for $3000 to Novartis and sent it back with a “no thanks”. He also turned down an offer by Roche to fly him to Amsterdam last June. In November Haines told the Federal Court, in a case brought by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, he was “increasingly concerned that I was compromising my independence and integrity”.

The pharmaceutical industry was dealt a bitter blow this week when a three-member panel headed by Justice Robert French ruled that Medicines Australia, the industry body covering more than 90 per cent of drug companies in Australia, could only continue to self-regulate its code of conduct if all drug companies twice a year forwarded complete information on hospitality: the venues, the number and types of professionals invited, the total cost of food, travel, accommodation and entertainment. This information would be published on a freely accessible internet database.

Source and for more information visit: smh.com.au