Re: Group Urges Ban on Medical Giveaways
From: art fougner, md (evsono@pipeline.com)
Tue Apr 29 10:07:28 2008
They can pry my Lilly stethoscope from my cold dead hands.
Art
At Mon, 28 Apr 2008, R. Daniel Braun wrote:
>
>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
>
--
art fougner, md
"May The Wings of Liberty Never Lose a Feather." - Jack Burton
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