Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15807

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

Soltan M.
In an otherwise routine account of drug makers and corrupt…
University Diaries 2009 Jun 12
http://www.margaretsoltan.com/?p=13876

Abstract:

… medical school professors conspiring to place fake articles praising their products in respectable journals, the reporter stumbles on one John Buse. Buse, a professor at the University of North Carolina, is remarkably candid about things.

Full text:

Buse said in a Nov. 28, 2006, deposition that working with drugmakers over a long period of time can change the way doctors think about clinical problems.

“It’s sort of like Stockholm Syndrome,” Buse said in the deposition, referring to a psychological phenomenon in which kidnap victims begin to sympathize with their captors.

“I’m not saying that the pharmaceutical industry captures me,” Buse said. “But to the extent that the relationship has something above and beyond medicine, science, you know, it could cloud one’s judgment.”

Buse added that many researchers develop emotional attachments to drugs they’ve discovered or studied extensively.

“There’s this natural tendency for people to fall in love with your drug: it’s like your child,” Buse said. “So you have a hard time accepting criticism.”

So there are at least two motives behind the outrageous conflict of interest scandal in America’s medical schools:

1.) A passionate affair with your drug which makes you desperate to protect it and show it in its best light – a desire its manufacturer abets.

2.) Raw greed.

Greed’s the biggie. Thinking your drug is your child is – let’s face it – supremely weird shit. I’m going to go ahead and suggest that few corrupt medical school professors are built this way. Most university-housed pharma salesmen – the Nemeroffs, Biedermans, and Stowes – are in it for the money. They love all drugs. That’s how you diversify your portfolio.