Let the sunshine in

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Doctors should be required to tell their patients if they are on the payroll of a pharmaceutical company, and those companies should have to disclose their payments to doctors.

Health food stores sell an array of fish oil supplements for an annual cost of $300 or less. Why would anybody pay 10 times that much for GlaxoSmithKline’s prescription version when doctors say they can find very little difference between it and its over-the-counter competitors?

The answer: Because insurance often covers the high-priced pills, and, we suspect, because doctors promote such prescription medications to other doctors.

While medical schools can require doctors who work for them to inform patients of their ties to pharmaceutical companies, there are no such restrictions on private doctors.

Medical schools

Doctors should be required to disclose such relationships to their patients. And drug makers should be required to report how much they are paying doctors and to whom those payments were made.

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