Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11841

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Goozner M.
IOM To Take On Conflicts of Interest
Gooznews (blog) 2007 Oct 24
http://web.archive.org/web/20080828112455/http://www.gooznews.com/archives/000842.html

Full text:

Conflicts of interest in medicine are ubiquitous, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association famously wrote a few years ago. The medical profession has two choices for dealing with this fact. It can either accept it and search for ways to manage conflicts of interest so it doesn’t harm patients, influence research or debase medical education. Or it can seek to reduce its influence.

The prestigious Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, has opted for a management strategy. Next month, one of its study committees will kick off an effort to develop model guidelines for managing conflicts of interest in medicine. The charge to the committee states that the guidelines should not stand in the way of academic collaboration with industry. They also state that the guidelines should reflect a consensus of the panel.

The tentative appointments to the 15-member panel include three members granted conflict-of-interest waivers because of their ongoing ties to drug and medical device companies, and at least one other with recent ties to industry that were neither waived nor revealed on the IOM website. One of the panelists is a recently retired scientist from Pfizer.

Prominent researchers in the field who were not appointed to the panel by the IOM included Jerome Kassirer, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and author of “On the Take,” Sheldon Krimsky of Tufts University, Lisa Bero of the University of California at San Francisco, or Eric Campbell of Massachusetts General Hospital, who just last week published a study documenting that 60 percent of academic department leaders at med schools have ties to industry.

Four scientists with ties to industry including a former industry employee are on the panel. All the prominent critics and informed researchers are excluded. The charge is to reach a consensus that doesn’t jeopardize industry-academic collaboration. Sound fair and balanced to you?

If you’re interested in commenting on the makeup of this panel, you can visit the IOM website and file comments here.