Is your doctor actually an agent of Big Pharma?

Just how conflicted can a top doc be?

Apparently, for Dr. Jose Baselga, “physician-in-chief” at the esteemed Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, there are no limits!

Because according to a new exposé, he authored papers, conducted research, and pushed new meds… all while earning a king’s ransom from Big Pharma.

But he’s no exception to the rule – because payments to docs and even hospitals by drugmakers are really par for the course.

From 2013 to 2016, Big Pharma wrote checks to over 900,000 doctors and 1,200 teaching hospitals!

The highest earner, Dr. Stephen Burkhart, topped his pay as a surgeon with over $65 million.

Lesser players just got a trip or two to Disneyland.

But don’t think for one minute that even smaller gifts wouldn’t change the way these bankrolled drugs and devices are pushed on patients.

Drugmakers wouldn’t waste money to the tune of over $9 billion paid to docs – in just the past three years — if it didn’t benefit sales.

That’s why it’s absolutely essential to pull back the curtain and get a good look at the shady dealings that may be the only reason you’re being prescribed a risky med.

You’re hearing all these details about Dr. Baselga now because of the Open Payments Program, a.k.a. the Sunshine Act of 2013. That requires payments made to doctors and hospitals by drug and device makers to be reported to the feds, who must make it publicly available.

Before that, it was practically impossible to find out who was paying whom.

And now, Dr. Baselga has a lot of explaining to do.

As top dog for “clinical operations” at Sloan Kettering, he was THE guy for drugmakers to butter up – that is, if they wanted to conduct trials there.

And as a result, he was paid close to $3.5 million from nine different drugmakers.

But that’s not the worst of it.

Dr. Baselga didn’t bother to disclose his financial ties within the majority of papers he authored about new meds.

Not only that, but he sometimes brazenly checked off a box saying that he had “nothing to disclose.”

Unbelievable.

In one shameful example, he was quoted on the Sloan Kettering website this past summer as saying that the findings of a Roche drug being examined for breast cancer were “incredibly exciting.”

Only… they weren’t. The trials turned out so badly that the drugmaker ditched its plans to bring the med to market.

And guess who had a very profitable connection to Roche?

That’s right, none other than Pharma’s little helper, Dr. Baselga!

He made headlines, of course, due to his high-status job. And once his thorny little problem was revealed, he resigned from Sloan Kettering faster than a greyhound chasing a squirrel.

But how many other conflicts could be found out there, among less prominent docs at smaller institutions?

Could your own doc be in on the take? There’s one way to know for sure!

Simply go to the Dollars for Docs website right here: projects.propublica.org/docdollars/.