Doctors’ Lucrative Industry Ties

NY Times,  May 13, 2013, By RONI CARYN RABIN    Dr. Alfred J. Tria is the chief of orthopedic surgery at St. Peter’s University Hospital, a 478-bed facility in New Brunswick, N.J., and to the medical technology company Smith & Nephew, his good word is worth a million bucks. Well, $940,857, to be precise.  That’s how much the company paid Dr. Tria in fees for promoting its products and training doctors in Asia to use them from 2009 to 2011, according to disclosures required by the state of Massachusetts, where Dr. Tria is licensed. In 2010, Dr. Tria earned $421,905 from private industry — more than any other Massachusetts-licensed physician that year.  Dr. Tria may be an outlier, but gifts and payments to physicians from drug and medical device companies have been rampant in medicine for decades.  Read more