Opinion: The ‘cancer growing in cancer medicine’: pharma money paid to doctors
Conflict of interest poisons the field of cancer medicine. It is surely a calculated maneuver by the industry to increase its profits.
Americans are rightly furious about the high and unsustainable price of cancer drugs, which now routinely cost more than $100,000 per year of therapy. Those prices are made worse by the fact that most cancer drugs offer only modest benefits — one study put the median benefit at 2.1 extra months of life — along with the fact that expert physicians frequently recommend these drugs for off-label uses, meaning using a drug for a purpose it was not initially approved for.
The , the Senate, have floated proposals to tackle drug prices. While all contain good ideas, none address one of the elephants in the room: the experts who tell doctors how to use these medications.
