The Avandia Case, and a Warning About How Bad Things Can Get

We have posted frequently about the controversy about rosiglitazone (Avandia, by GlaxoSmithKline). Some of the distressing aspects of the case were various efforts made to keep information and opinions unfavorable to Avandia away from physicians, the patients, and the public, including efforts involving obfuscation, deception, and intimidation. (For example, see this post about the "spinning" of Avandia and the ridiculing of Avandia critics, and this post about attempts to silence an early Avandia critic.)

This month, the British Medical Journal printed a news article about the US Senate report that claimed that the critic, Dr John Buse, was intimidated by top GSK executives.

Perhaps with deliberate irony, on the same page was another news article, headlined, "One in 20 East German doctors spied on patients or colleagues." It was based on a study by the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism,

About 5% of doctors in the former East Germany spied on their colleagues or patients as unofficial members of the East German secret police (the Staatssicherheit or Stasi), a new report has shown.

The study, by the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism, Dresden, and commissioned by the German Medical Association and the German medical journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt, showed that the percentage of unofficial members of the Stasi among doctors was higher than in the East German population as a whole.

'Doctors were one of the main targets of the Stasi because they were thought to belong to a reactionary class and were thought to be especially interested in escaping to West Germany,' said Francesca Weil, author of the study....

Of those doctors who were unofficial spies, about a quarter passed on information not only about colleagues but also about their patients' health and private lives. Psychiatrists and sports medicine experts were the most common specialists among the unofficial spies, and a third of them held a leading position in a hospital. The Stasi also recruited medical students.

Reasons for spying varied. Some doctors were trying to advance their career or were afraid that their careers would suffer if they did not participate; others were committed socialists; and another group liked the economic advantages, which ranged from monthly cash payments to fast tracked delivery of a car or other luxuries.

In my humble opinion, physicians in the West should not view the latter article as affirmation that we do not have things so bad. Rather it is a warning about how bad things can get.