Re: Group Urges Ban on Medical Giveaways
From: Ronald Ainsworth (ainsron@sbcglobal.net)
Tue Apr 29 21:49:54 2008
The latest ACOG update has the same opinion.
According to the three participants, even taking a pen
from a drug company and wearing it in your pocket,
writing Rx with it, and having it seen by patients
sends the wrong message - that we are in bed with the
drug reps. They point to psychological studies that
demonstrate that it is not the cost of the gift that
motivates the recepient to return a favor to the giver
of the gift. The Ken and Barbies of the drug rep
world now how to get close to docs and influence them.
Ethically, we can all be bought for less than we
think, whether it is a book, a stethoscope, a dinner
or a donut. It was a interesting discussion to listen
to. Did it change my habit's or my opinion that I
personally am immune to taking bribes? Certainly not,
it is you, not me that it is talking about.
--- "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
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