Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15822

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

Rodwin MA.
Medical Commerce, Physician Entrepreneurialism, and Conflicts of Interest
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 2007 Aug 15; 16:387-397
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessionid=0F091D73840B2E8D67DA5186C0E4801E.tomcat1?fromPage=online&aid=1299484

Abstract:

Is medical commerce a recent phenomenon? Does it distort the patient–physician relationship? Are investor-owned firms the main source of medical commercialism? I contend that medicine has generally been commerce in the United States, that medical commerce is a problem when it creates or worsens physicians’ conflicts of interest, and that these conflicts thrive in nonprofit organizations as well as in investor-owned firms. I provide a historical sketch to show that physician entrepreneurialism, rather than commerce generally, is the main source of physicians’ conflicts of interest.

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we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909