A Georgetown professor warns in this week's BMJ that doctors can not be lapdogs to drug companies.
Her warning comes after she addressed a conference about the influence of the drug industry on continuing medical education. And after several companies withdrew or threatened to withdraw their support for future conferences because of what she said.
Professor Adriane Fugh-Berman’s talk covered the costs of drugs, the costs of promoting drugs to doctors, the salaries of drug representatives, and the funding of continuing medical education. She also covered psychological profiling and monitoring of physicians, including prescription tracking.
She writes, “Drug representatives are paid to be nice to us, as long as we cooperate, sustaining market share of targeted drugs, and limiting our continuing medical education lectures to messages that increase drug sales. ...If we remain dependent on pharmaceutical companies for sponsoring continuing medical education, then these courses will remain under the control of the drug industry. This control is not contractual, but it is enforced through psychological manipulation. ... As a last resort, we physicians could actually pay for our continuing education, as do lawyers, accountants, business people and aerobics teachers, to mention a few." ...Medicine must shed its docility and the corporate leash. Let us not be a lapdog to the pharmaceutical industry. Rather than sitting contentedly in our master’s lap, let us turn around and bite something tender. Freedom calls.”
In the same issue of BMJ, editor Fiona Godlee writes, "Trust is at stake in every decision doctors make, and unchecked clinical enthusiasm can threaten professional integrity. Above all, beware of optimism bias... Two papers in the BMJ suggest that this "unwarranted belief in the value of interventions" has been at work with statins."
Optimism bias is fed by pharma influence. Thanks, BMJ, for publishing these important observations.
Posted by schwitz at November 11, 2006 09:00 AM | TrackBack