Penalties for Doctors who Refuse to Sell Cholesterol Drugs
On Wednesday July 9,2008 the Garden Island Newspaper published my Letter To The Editor (Thank you Garden Isle)
I feel my patients and the people of Hawai‘i have the right to know some of what goes on behind the scenes at HMSA, our island’s number one health insurance company. This week, I will participate in a teleconference about a new initiative program created by HMSA as part of what they call “quality of care.” If you have diabetes, your doctor will be paid more if he or she convinces you to buy a cholesterol-lowering pill. How much more? If I get all my diabetics on these pills, I calculate that I may earn up to $20,000 more next year. Sounds great for me, and you might think I’d be an idiot to question such an easy cash gift. But I don’t think I’ll go for it. I don’t think there is enough scientific evidence that this practice will help all my diabetic patients, and I can’t justify such mindless, mass prescribing.For more information on what’s happening behind the scenes, check out www.drcate.com And if you are a paying customer of HMSA, you might want to join the discussion by contacting HMSA’s vice president/medical director John Berthiaume.
Catey Shanahan, M.D.
Lawa‘i
On Friday, HMSA Fired Back:
This Irishwoman loves to get the last word, and I didn’t like the insinuation that I wasn’t aware of what doctors are being told to do by organizations like the ADA and the ACC. So I sent one more letter to the Garden Island Newspaper. But no luck this time, they didn’t print it. Here’s what I wrote:
I thank Dr. Fujimoto from HMSA for responding to my letter. As trained medical practitioners, we doctors are capable of reading the research and drawing our own conclusions – but we must read the data first. HMSA’s medical directorship outsources this responsibility to consensus panels and organizations such as the American Diabetic Association and the American Heart Association – and that’s a problem. These organizations have strong financial ties to industry and their conclusions are far from unimpeachable. The conflicts of interest run so deep that they have been repeatedly exposed by major players within the medical establishment, including The New England Journal of Medicine’s editor Dr. Jerome Kassirer, Harvard University’s Dr. John Abramson, the Center for Medical Consumers, and many others. Patients are best served when doctors read the research themselves and remain free to make decisions without corporate interference from insurance plans.
I’ve read the research data on the use of statins in diabetics in all its monotonous detail, not just the consensus panel summaries. The data shows that some diabetics benefit and some are harmed. There’s no such thing as a drug without side effects, and statins may cause memory loss, depression, nerve damage, bacterial sepsis, muscle damage (including heart muscle) and cancer. To say that all diabetics will benefit is truthiness, not the truth. In my opinion, this national trend toward paying some doctors less than others for treating patients in accordance with the best available scientific data will lead to predictable harms.
Catey Shanahan, MD
West Kauai Clinic Kalaheo
Here are a links to some of the people who inspired me to think for myself:
The New England Journal of Medicine’s former editor, Jerome Kassirer
Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels, Authors of Selling Sickness
And the creators of this video:
And for any doctor out there who wants to know why a growing number of scientists and physicians are skeptical of the benefits of these medications, a few more links:
Dr. Duane Graveline, author of Statin Drug Side Effects and many articles. This site is full of technical and interesting information that doesn’t make our medical journals.
Cardiologist Peter H Langsjoen, MD, FACC
Uffe Ravnskov, MD and author of The Cholesterol Myths
Malcolm Kendrick, MD and author of The Great Cholesterol Con
The International Consortium of Cholesterol Skeptic
Thanks for posting. I am a first-year med student at the University of New England, and I have some reservations about the statin drugs based on my studies of the importance of cholesterol in the body and observations of family members and friends who are taking these drugs or have in the past. I wanted to discuss this subject with my academic advisor-who teaches pharmacology-but he dismissed it by saying that the drugs are perfectly safe and that the problems I’ve noticed in others are due to other causes. He may be right to some degree, but I, as a future physician, would have serious concerns about prescribing statins to patients. Thanks for getting the word out-we need more skeptical voices!