Physician Payment Sunshine: Cephalon Reports 2009 Payments to Physician Consultants and Speakers

 

As part of their September 2008 corporate integrity agreement, Cephalon posted payments to physician consultants and speakers for 2009. 

The report is broken out by ranges paid to their consultants and speakers for services from $500 to $149,900 for the year.  According to their website Cephalon has a cap on the total compensation for speakers and consultants.

In addition to the payments they have included a Question and Answer section that outlines the reasoning behind the disclosures and the format that they are presented.

Cephalon joins GSK, Eli Lilly and Merck as pharmaceutical companies reporting payments to physicians

It is important to note in reading these transparency reports that because of legal reasons there is very little context to the payments. 

In the end the physicians working with Cephalon educated thousands of physicians around the country on important treatments.

Comments

[Lily Chu]

The line between "educating" and "advising" is very much blurred. It's very naive to believe that those physicians can keep objective when prescribing drugs while they receive money from those companies. Drugs "off-label use" already became a serious safety issue. Do you know that nearly 90% Actiq prescriptions are "off-label" while Actiq actually a Schedule II controlled substance, in the same category as cocaine? over 100 deaths were caused by Actiq, including children.