Psychiatrists Top List in Drug Maker Gifts

From the New York Times:

As states begin to require that drug companies disclose their payments to doctors for lectures and other services, a pattern has emerged: psychiatrists earn more money from drug makers than doctors in any other specialty.
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Officials in Maine and Vermont said they would try to compare reports of payments to doctors with Medicaid records to explore how marketing practices might influence prescribing by doctors in ways that increased costs to taxpayers.

“What we want to be able to do is overlay the prescribing information that we have with the drug detailing information,” said Jude Walsh, special assistant to the governor of Maine, John E. Baldacci. “If we see that doctors in a certain southern county in the state are prescribing a lot of a drug and getting a lot of detailing for that drug, that could lead to some record reviews to see what’s happening.”