--
Richard Chudacoff, MD, FACOG
_____
From: ob-gyn-l@obgyn.net [mailto:ob-gyn-l@obgyn.net] On Behalf Of R. Daniel
Braun
Sent: Monday, April 28, 2008 10:58 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list OB-GYN-L
Subject: Re: Group Urges Ban on Medical Giveaways
Yeah ,et the Drug Companies spend that on advertising to the public. It is a
lot more effective at creating a demand for a product. Check out Cialis and
Viagra. Oh yeah, who ever heard of congenital dry eyes before restasis came
out on TV.
Just my opinion.
Dan
On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 12:18 PM, Dean Huffman . <dean@thehuffpeople.net>
wrote:
..
Group Urges Ban on Medical Giveaways
By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: April 28, 2008, NY Times
Drug and medical device companies should be banned from offering free food,
gifts, travel and ghost-writing services to doctors, staff members and
students
in all 129 of the nation's medical colleges, an influential college
association
has concluded.
The proposed ban is the result of a two-year effort by the group, the
Association of American Medical Colleges, to create a model policy governing
interactions between the schools and industry. While schools can ignore the
association's advice, most follow its recommendations.
Rob Restuccia, executive director of the Prescription Project, a nonprofit
group
dedicated to eliminating conflicts of interest in medicine, said the report
would transform medical education.
"Most medical schools do not have strong conflict-of-interest policies, and
this
report will change that," Mr. Restuccia said.
The rules would apply only to medical schools, but they could have enormous
influence across medicine, said Dr. David Rothman, president of the
Institute
on Medicine as a Profession at Columbia University.
"We're hoping the example set by academic medical colleges will be
contagious,"
Dr. Rothman said.
Drug companies spend billions wooing doctors - more than they spend on
research
or consumer advertising. Medical schools, packed with prominent professors
and
impressionable trainees, are particularly attractive marketing targets.
So companies have for decades provided faculty and students free food and
gifts,
offered lucrative consulting arrangements to top-notch teachers and even
ghost-wrote research papers for busy professors.
"Such forms of industry involvement tend to establish reciprocal
relationships
that can inject bias, distort decision-making and create the perception
among
colleagues, students, trainees and the public that practitioners are being
'bought' or 'bribed' by industry," the report said.
A group of influential doctors decried these practices in a 2006 article in
The
Journal of the American Medical Association, and said that medical schools
should ban them. In the article's wake, the medical college association
created
a task force.
With Dr. Roy Vagelos, a former Merck chief executive, serving as the task
force's chairman and the chief executives of Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Amgen and
Medtronic on the roster, some who advocate for greater restrictions on
industry
influence in medicine predicted that the report would be weak.
They were wrong.
In addition to the gift, food and travel bans, the report recommended that
medical schools should "strongly discourage participation by their faculty
in
industry-sponsored speakers' bureaus," in which doctors are paid to promote
drug and device benefits.
It recommended that schools set up centralized systems for accepting free
drug
samples or "alternative ways to manage pharmaceutical sample distribution
that
do not carry the risks to professionalism with which current practices are
associated." It suggested that schools audit independently accredited
medical
education seminars given by faculty "for the presence of inappropriate
influence." And it said the rules should apply to faculty even when off-duty
or
away from school.
Speakers' bureaus and drug samples are pillars of the industry's marketing
operations, and many medical school professors have resisted efforts to
restrict them. Only a handful of medical schools presently bar faculty
members
from serving on speakers' bureaus, so if this recommendation is widely
adopted,
it could transform the relationship between medical school faculty and
industry,
and it could change substantially the way medical education is routinely
delivered.
Indeed, the chief executives of Pfizer and Eli Lilly dissented from the
report's
recommendation regarding speakers' bureaus.
"We continue to believe that these types of programs, which are subject to
clear
regulations regarding their content, can be worthwhile educational
activities,"
wrote Jeffrey B. Kindler of Pfizer and Sidney Taurel of Lilly.
David Beier, an Amgen senior vice president, wrote a letter that endorsed
the
report's recommendations but disagreed with some of its text "because we
have a
different view about the accuracy concerning representations about the
motives
of the participants in industry-academic interactions."
Ken Johnson of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America,
said
his group would review the report.
"Providing physicians - and medical students - with timely, accurate
information
about the medicines they prescribe clearly benefits patients and advances
healthcare throughout the United States," Mr. Johnson said.
Dr. Robert J. Alpern, dean of the Yale School of Medicine, said that the
university presently had no limits on participation in company speakers'
bureaus, but that because of the medical college association's report he was
thinking of taking them on.
"I don't have a problem with doctors making $3,000 or $5,000 a year on the
side," he said, "but it's a totally different thing when it's $80,000." Even
more distasteful, Dr. Alpern said, is that the slides used in many of these
presentations are created by drug makers, not the speakers.
"That's like ghost-talking," Dr. Alpern said.
Dr. Arthur S. Levine, dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of
Medicine,
said that when he graduated from medical school in 1964, Eli Lilly gave him
his
first doctor's bag, and Roche gave him an Omega watch for being
valedictorian.
He still has the watch.
But this year's graduating class of doctors at Pittsburgh will not be
allowed to
accept any of these gifts, and the daily pizza lunches brought by drug
companies
are gone, he said.
Julie Gottlieb, assistant dean of policy coordination for Johns Hopkins
University School of Medicine, said Hopkins had adopted some of the
association's recommendations and was considering others.
"This report is bound to influence our deliberations," she said.
Dr. Vagelos, formerly of Merck, said that the report's recommendations were
certain to face resistance among faculty who liked the present system.
"The outcome of this for the industry is that those companies that are
strong in
science will always be welcome at medical colleges and others won't," Dr.
Vagelos said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/us/28doctors.html?ref=us
--
R. Daniel Braun, MD FACOG(L) ABMP CMTh
Professor Emeritus
Dept. of Obstetrics and Gynecology
Indiana U. School of Medicine
R. Daniel Braun
"Science without Religion is LAME; Religion without Science is BLIND"
Einstein 1941
