Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14165

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: Journal Article

Podolsky SH, Greene JA.
A Historical Perspective of Pharmaceutical Promotion and Physician Education
JAMA 2008 Aug 20; 300:(7):831
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/extract/300/7/831

Abstract:

The medical profession has recently awakened to a crisis over industrial influence in medical education. In recent years, the problem of industrial funding of continuing medical education (CME) has been the subject of stern warnings from academic medicine, prominent congressional hearings, and strict revisions of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education’s Standards for Commercial Support. Commercial support for CME continues to increase and now comprises more than half of all CME income. These clear indicators of dependence have raised widespread concerns of bias in the ongoing education of practicing physicians regarding new drugs and failure of the medical profession to assume responsibility for educating physicians.1

How did this come to be? Critics of the role of pharmaceutical promotion in medical education have claimed that policy changes in the 1980s altered relations between the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry. However, . . .