Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13918
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
Wang SS.
Pfizer Stops Funding Some Classes for Doctors
The Wall Street Journal 2008 Jul 2
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/07/02/pfizer-stops-funding-some-classes-for-doctors/?mod=yahoo_hs
Full text:
Doctors and pharmaceutical companies have been getting beat up lately for their intimate ties (see here, here and here). Now Pfizer is backing off a bit from one of its connections to medical practice: funding for physicians’ continuing medical education, or CME, courses.
The drug maker has decided to end payments for CME are provided by for-profit, third-party companies. It will continue funding courses offered by academic medical centers, teaching hospitals and medical societies.
“The reason we’re not going to directly support them has to do with mitigating the perception of a conflict of interest, if a direct payment is going from a company like Pfizer to them,” Cathryn Clary, VP of US external medical affairs, told Dow Jones Newswires.
Pfizer told DJ wires it spent $80 million funding CME courses last year; less than half went to for-profit companies.
The drug industry as a whole spent over $1 billion in 2006 funding these courses, which doctors must attend in order to keep their medical licenses. As the WSJ reported a few years back, the companies’ funding of CME intensified after the industry agreed it should spend money educating physicians, rather than simply entertaining them.
But there’s been serious concern by some senators about whether the industry’s money overly influences doctors, prompting them to use too many expensive medicines and devices. The Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education, which monitors more than 700 CME providers, has talked about sending auditors to CME courses to investigate.
We’ll be interested to see whether Pfizer’s move away from for-profit CME companies inspires other drug companies to do the same.
