Physicians Respond to GoLocal Report on Doc’s Receiving Payments from Drug Co.‘s
Saturday, March 10, 2012
We are baffled. You seem to condemn physicians for virtuous work. You imply that taking money for pharmaceutical investigations is tainted. With better understanding you might have entitled the article “breakthrough research performed by community physicians.” Turning research into practical advances costs more than the NIH and other basic funding provides. So, pharmaceutical companies fund the steps that complement the basic research done at medical schools.
The community physicians who do this work are heroes employing many nurses and doctors with the kind of jobs we want to have here in Central MA. We in Central MA should be proud for our role in these important clinical advances. Consider the patients who enrolled in the community based study to get FDA approval for Humira. Their rheumatoid arthritis would have inevitably destroyed their joints, so they risked unknown side effects and were rewarded with 15 years of free medication and normal joints. Now that’s a story.
Bruce Karlin MD
200 Lincoln St
Worcester, MA
George Abraham MD
St Vincent Hospital
Worcester, MA
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