Doctor Quits to Become Paid Pharma Speaker – No More Moonlighting for One MD

I don’t know for sure but I might guess the offer might be providing a generous source of income to leave his current physician at a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital, and I’m sure others might be pondering the same question here. There is of course the conflict of interest in doing both, so the doctor made the decision that was a fit for him. The article states he was part time, but like anywhere sometimes part time opportunities lead to full time.

As we all know pharma depends on physicians and from this standpoint you wonder if all the information will be unbiased, but today we have data that somehow gets in there for some checks and balances, that is if it is not hidden, but that doesn’t last too long anyway today.

The Chief of Cardiology has taken a different income route, he wrote a novel on the underworld of transplants and the extreme measure to which people will go. BD

Medical Novel/Technothriller Written by the Chief of Cardiac Surgery at Yale - “Transplant”

Boston physician Lawrence M. DuBuske was given a choice: Either stop moonlighting as a paid speaker for pharmaceutical companies or quit his job at a top Harvard teaching hospital.

To the surprise of some, DuBuske, an allergy and asthma specialist and a Harvard Medical School instructor, will resign from Brigham and Women’s Hospital at the end of the month, the hospital said.

DuBuske is no ordinary speaker. Out of thousands of US doctors hired by drug-maker GlaxoSmithKline to talk about its products, he was the highest paid during a three-month period last year, the company recently disclosed: He made $99,375 for giving 40 talks to other physicians last April, May, and June, almost one every other day.

“He made a decision between terminating the relationship with Glaxo and terminating his relationship with the Brigham, to do the latter,’’ Clark said.

In addition to seeing patients at the Brigham, DuBuske, 55, runs a Gardner-based nonprofit organization called the Immunology Research Institute of New England, which sponsors education programs for doctors in Eastern Europe, according to its website.

Doctor quits Brigham to speak for pay - The Boston Globe