"Around the country, doctors in private practice have set up tax-exempt charities [3] into which drug companies [4] and medical device makers are, with little fanfare, pouring donations — money that adds up to millions of dollars a year," Reed Abelson reports in the New York Times. Concern has been raised that the funding can bias medical decisions, create conflicts of interest which aren't disclosed to patients and potentially skew research results in favour of the funder. "There's undoubtedly corruption in the system," Dr. Cherf said. "We need healthy relationships between physicians and industry. Both parties have been too aggressive."