Association of American Medical Colleges urges Ban on Medical Giveaways
Gardiner Harris in the New York Times specifically reports:
Drug and medical device companies should be banned from offering free food, gifts, travel and ghost-writing services to doctors, staff members and students in all 129 of the nation’s medical colleges, an influential college association has concluded.
The case against these corrupting practices is convincing:
Drug companies spend billions wooing doctors — more than they spend on research or consumer advertising. Medical schools, packed with prominent professors and impressionable trainees, are particularly attractive marketing targets.
So companies have for decades provided faculty and students free food and gifts, offered lucrative consulting arrangements to top-notch teachers and even ghost-wrote research papers for busy professors.
“Such forms of industry involvement tend to establish reciprocal relationships that can inject bias, distort decision-making and create the perception among colleagues, students, trainees and the public that practitioners are being ‘bought’ or ‘bribed’ by industry,” the report said.
The drug companies like, Merck “Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Amgen and Medtronic” have empty claims to the contrary:
They were wrong.
In addition to the gift, food and travel bans, the report recommended that medical schools should “strongly discourage participation by their faculty in industry-sponsored speakers’ bureaus,” in which doctors are paid to promote drug and device benefits.
More ethical guidelines and transparency in this area which is in great need of reform. I firmly believe that more open discussion about such issues would help improve the medical community and our national welfare.