Leaders of ten US medical associations took $130 million from industry in three years; psychiatry's median was $212

Significant findings

Moynihan and colleagues took the leaders of the ten US professional medical associations covering the costliest disease areas, 328 people, and looked each one up in Open Payments, the federal database of what drug and device manufacturers pay physicians, for 2017 to 2019.

235 of 328 leaders, 72 percent, had an industry financial relationship; among the 293 who were medical doctors or doctors of osteopathy, 80 percent did. Total payments were about $130 million: $24.8 million in general payments and $104.6 million in research payments. The median per leader was $31,805.

The variation between associations was the finding. The American Society of Clinical Oncology's leaders had a median of $518,000; the American College of Rheumatology's $251,464; the American College of Physicians' $404; the American Psychiatric Association's $212.

The authors' conclusion, verbatim: "Financial relationships between the leaders of influential US professional medical associations and industry are extensive, although with variation among the associations."

Worth asking

On the government's own records, psychiatry's association leadership sat at the bottom of that variation. The same database tells a different story about the profession's rank and file, which is the next row. Both are true at once.