The medical community continues to think that conflict of interest does not apply to themselves and the Bush FDA was only too happy to go along with the program. How can patients trust doctors when they have become extensions of Big Pharma? Why should patient/consumers trust anything that the FDA approves when the process has been so deeply tainted? I don't really care whether the medical community likes it or not, but as a consumer, I think everyone deserves to know more about the process.
The Food and Drug Administration does almost nothing to police the financial conflicts of doctors who conduct clinical trials of drugs and medical devices in human subjects, government investigators are reporting.
Moreover, the investigators say, agency officials told them that trying to protect patients from such conflicts was not worth the effort.
In 42 percent of clinical trials, the agency did not receive forms disclosing doctors’ financial conflicts and did nothing about the problem, according to the investigation, which was conducted by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services and whose results were scheduled to be made public Monday.
In 31 percent of the trials in which the agency did receive the required forms, agency reviewers did not document that they looked at the information. And in 20 percent of the cases in which doctors revealed significant financial conflicts, neither the F.D.A. nor the sponsoring companies took any action to deal with the conflicts, the investigators found.
Karen Riley, a spokeswoman for the F.D.A, said the agency opposed reviewing doctors’ financial conflicts before trials because they represented just one possible source of bias.
A similar investigation by the inspector general last year found that the National Institutes of Health did almost nothing to police the financial conflicts of university professors who received federal money. And like their colleagues at the F.D.A., officials at the health institutes said they did not want to start doing so, that investigation found.
