Pay for Clinical Trial Enrollment Is Wrong: UK Docs LONDON (Reuters Health) - Patients should be told if their general practitioners (GPs) are being paid by pharmaceutical companies to recruit them into clinical trials, British doctors said on Friday. British general practitioners can be paid thousands of pounds for patients completing a drug company-sponsored trial, which can amount to as much as 15,000 a year, Drs. Jammi Rao and Louis Sant Cassia write in the British Medical Journal. But doctors often do not disclose the payments to patients, a practice that undermines the ideal of informed consent and increases the potential for conflict of interest, say the two doctors, both of whom chair regional research ethics committees. "Financial advisors selling insurance or mortgages have to tell you how much commission they earn. The rules should be the same for doctors who ask patients to take part in clinical trials," Rao, director of public health at North Birmingham Primary Care Trust in Birmingham, told Reuters Health. Non-doctors on ethics committees are very surprised that there is no requirement to divulge the amount of payment made to GPs by pharmaceutical companies, he added. According to Rao, paying recruiters leads to two kinds of bad practice--first, patients may be subtly coerced into participating in trials without knowing the full facts, and second, they interfere with the decision as to which trials doctors take part in. "The trials that are done all too often depend on the depth of the sponsor's pockets, rather than the validity of the questions addressed by the research trial and the questions addressed," he added. [07/08/2002; Reuters Health] Remember we are NOT Doctors and have NO medical training. This site is like an Encylopedia - there are many pages, many links on many topics. Support our work with any size DONATION - see left side of any page - for how to donate. You can help raise awareness of CAM.