Sep 21, 2026 · 12 min · 7 segments
A Washington Post investigation found that Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk paid more than $270 million to physicians and other prescribers between 2018 and 2025. On *The Gist Healthcare Podcast*…
Lydia SidhomGuestJ. Carlisle LarsenHostNow, this was a team effort, and you share the byline with two other colleagues.
But what made you and your team want to investigate the relationship between GLP drug makers and clinicians?
So my colleagues and I were really interested in GLP-1s as a coverage area because they have become so popular.
But we were particularly interested in looking into the relationship between pharmaceutical companies and doctors, because this is data that is published publicly, but has not really been looked into that much.
So we thought people have looked into the advertising to consumers aspect of GLP-1s, but What do doctors think about it? And what do pharmaceutical companies want doctors to know?
Your analysis found that Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk paid roughly $270 million to about 250,000 prescribers over a seven-year period.
What did the scale of those payments tell you? And how did the number of prescribers change over time?
So the scale was what made me and my colleagues want to really pursue this story, because the way that we looked at this data was basically we can see the government makes public every single time a company, any company pays any doctor for any drug.
And what we found is that there have been more doctors that have been paid for related to GLP-1s than any other drug.
And so we kind of were wondering why are the companies focused on spreading kind of the gospel of GLP-1s to such a wide range of doctors.
They haven't necessarily paid the most money out of all of the drug companies, but they've paid the most doctors.
And we have seen every year since 2021 that there have been more and more doctors.
And We were kind of interested in looking at how the scale of these payments has influenced the entire medical community.
Now, this was a team effort, and you share the byline with two other colleagues.
But what made you and your team want to investigate the relationship between GLP drug makers and clinicians?
So my colleagues and I were really interested in GLP-1s as a coverage area because they have become so popular.
But we were particularly interested in looking into the relationship between pharmaceutical companies and doctors, because this is data that is published publicly, but has not really been looked into that much.
So we thought people have looked into the advertising to consumers aspect of GLP-1s, but What do doctors think about it? And what do pharmaceutical companies want doctors to know?
Your analysis found that Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk paid roughly $270 million to about 250,000 prescribers over a seven-year period.
What did the scale of those payments tell you? And how did the number of prescribers change over time?
So the scale was what made me and my colleagues want to really pursue this story, because the way that we looked at this data was basically we can see the government makes public every single time a company, any company pays any doctor for any drug.
And what we found is that there have been more doctors that have been paid for related to GLP-1s than any other drug.
And so we kind of were wondering why are the companies focused on spreading kind of the gospel of GLP-1s to such a wide range of doctors.
They haven't necessarily paid the most money out of all of the drug companies, but they've paid the most doctors.
And we have seen every year since 2021 that there have been more and more doctors.
And We were kind of interested in looking at how the scale of these payments has influenced the entire medical community.
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