Overmedicating Patients & Speaking For Drugmakers

A jury in upstate New York recently found that a doctor’s negligence caused a patient to commit suicide by overmedicating him with psychiatric drugs. As it turns out, the same doctor was also paid more than $200,000 by various drugmakers for more than a decade to promote some of the same psychiatric medicines to other doctors, The Syracuse Post-Standard reports. There is more. William Beals, 61, a family medicine doctor in Liverpool, New York, was disciplined by the state early last year for prescribing drugs to patients for years without ever seeing them in his office, the paper writes. In September, he was censured by the state for abusing alcohol and drugs, and placed on probation for five years. In the state court malpractice trial, the jury awarded $1.5 million to the family of the former patient, a high school coach and teacher, after hearing testimony that Beals prescribed antidepressants and other drugs without seeing the patient for many years and also placed him on a dose that was too high before his death, according to the paper. Meanwhile, he collected more than $58,000 from Eli Lilly (LLY), which sells the Zyprexa antipsychotic and Cymbalta antidepressant, in 2009 and 2010, according to information on the company web site (see this). However, the paper reports that Beals stopped working for Lilly as a speaker in 2010. The drugmaker, however, declined to tell the paper which drugs that Beal helped promote or why his speaking work ended when it did. But in a...
Source: Pharmalot - Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Cymbalta Effexor Eli Lilly GlaxoSmithKline Paxil Pfizer Zyprexa Source Type: blogs