Healthy Skepticism Library item: 20059

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: Magazine

Hart D
Stand up for doctors' integrity
Australian Doctor 2006 Aug 1827

Full text:

Editor It is the final straw when I hear that the CPD program may be in difficulty due to the supposed intervention of the drug companies (‘Hospitality crackdown threatens CPD’, 4 August). When is someone in our profession bodies going to stand up and take it to the reporters and pollies who are knocking us?

What, at the end of the day, is a political lobbyist other than someone who has their own agenda with the pollies and wants their opinion to the fore.

What are all these donations to the political parties about? Does anyone really believe that they are from a kind benefactor with no axe to grind? I don’t think so.

So when the pollies talk about my $10 lunch from one of the drug reps, I have a suggestion of where to stick it, and it would need surgical removal.

If it’s okay for the pollies, lawyers and reporters to be entertained, why can’t we be treated similarly (albeit on probably a lot smaller budget than the boys in Canberra)?

Come on boys, one of you in the AMA, RACGP or any of the other useless, toothless representative bodies needs to stand up and be counted. Enough is enough. I’m sick to death of the fact we have to apologise for the hospitality we receive, paltry as it is, but the other ‘professions’ don’t.

It’s time to earn your money and stand up for all us doctors who are working hard under an ever-failing system. A $1 meal will not buy my soul (though a round-the-world trip to “study cultural facets” of various countries stopping at Venice, Paris, Rome, London and New York may do the deed).

Dr David Hart
Burleigh Heads, Qld