Surgeons Received $80 Million from DePuy for Hip Implant Promotion

The New Haven Independent has published surprising facts about DePuy Orthopedics related to its recent hip device recall.

Newest Claims against DePuy Orthopedics

DePuy Orthopedics, a company which is now experiencing intense scrutiny due to the lawsuits filed against it, was reported to have allegedly paid more than $80 million to at least 200 individual surgeons across the United States since 2009. The lawsuits DePuy is facing came about because of unusually high rates of hip complications related to their ASR device. The first question that comes to mind is: why did the company make these staggeringly high payments to physicians? The total amounts received by some doctors topped $1 million per year. In one case, Dr. John J. Callaghan of Iowa City was paid $2,638,097 in 2009 and another $1,423,084 in 2010, all from DePuy.
The device manufacturer says that the fees can be explained as a combination of administrative costs, compensation for research, product royalties, and other related costs. The high amount of these fees led critics to question the ramifications of physicians taking payments from a private healthcare company. They wonder if transactions of this nature will compromise the professional objectivity of a doctor, as well as his or her relationships with patients. If the so-called “administrative costs” paid to doctors by DePuy are actually millions of dollars in generous kickbacks, this could clearly lead to biased recommendations and diagnoses.
DePuy gave more than $47.9 million to surgeons in 2009, and they paid more than $32.9 million to surgeons in the first nine months of 2010. The 2010 payments are particularly startling because the continued even while 93,000 faulty hip implants were being recalled due to severe complications.

Moral Dilemma Raised by DePuy Payments

The issues critics are concerned with are those of ethics:

• When DePuy hip implant surgeons take money from the manufacturer of the hip implant device, does this compromise the doctor-patient relationship?
• Can the staggeringly high payments made to these doctors explain the fact that more than 93,000 defective devices were implanted in patients?
• Is DePuy disguising kickbacks as administrative costs, grants, or consulting fees in order to sell as many faulty hip implants as possible to unsuspecting patients?

Doctors Defend DePuy Payments

When the New Haven Independent interviewed doctors, they spoke up in defense of the high payments. According to physicians, there are indeed administrative costs involved in gathering patient data. This data is then, they say, used to better evaluate the DePuy hip implant devices. The process of collecting such data begins with a signed waiver from the recipient of the implant, and thus the bulk of the administrative costs are explained away.

The True Cost of a DePuy Hip

Patients are people, not subjects of an experiment. It has never been and will never be acceptable for medical device manufacturers to perform testing and research on innocent patients already suffering from health problems.
The fact that the DePuy ASR device has such a high failure rate across the board and was forced to be recalled suggests that the manufacturer pushed a dangerous and unfinished product into the market. Doctors and private healthcare companies alike have an astonishing potential to do good, and yet those who are in desperate need of true innovative medical practices are often overlooked in favor of profit margins.
DePuy hip recipients are paying the true cost of the defective implant, suffering painful hip revision surgery, hipbone fracture, dislocation of the implant, and the serious effects of metal poisoning.