Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13592

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

Editorial .
Should They Send a Thank-You Note?
New York Times 2008 Apr 29
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/29/opinion/29tue4.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref

Full text:

Doctors almost always take umbrage at the notion that their judgments can be influenced by free lunches or plane tickets to a resort paradise. Most patients would prefer that their doctors aren’t even tempted.

So we find it encouraging that a task force of medical and industry leaders has recommended a new set of restrictions on what doctors, staff members and students at the nation’s medical schools can accept from the makers and sellers of drugs and medical devices.

Outright bans would be imposed on personal gifts, industry-supplied food and meals, free travel that is not reimbursement for services and payment for attending industry-sponsored meetings. Also outlawed are the notorious ghostwriting services, in which a drug company drafts a journal article and then persuades a respected academic to sign on as the lead author, giving it a gloss of objectivity that it may not deserve.

Free drug samples, though not banned, would generally have to be accepted by a central pharmacy, presumably capable of assessing their value, not by individual doctors more susceptible to sales pitches.

Unfortunately, the task force, appointed by the Association of American Medical Colleges, flinched on some important issues.

It urged medical schools to “strongly discourage” faculty from participating in industry speakers’ bureaus, which pay influential doctors to promote the benefits of products, but it stopped short of calling for a complete ban on the highly dubious practice.

Similarly, the group did not call for an end to industry subsidies of continuing medical education programs that doctors must take to retain their licenses. Instead, it simply proposed steps to audit the content of the programs and ensure that they are scientifically objective. It is hard to see why doctors should not pay the full cost of their own continuing education.

The proposals are aimed at the nation’s 129 medical schools. We hope the schools quickly adopt them – and strengthen them – and that the entire medical profession follows their lead. Patients need to be assured that their doctors are prescribing what’s best for them, not what’s best for companies.