BAN URGED ON GIFTS AT MEDICAL SCHOOLS
By GARDINER HARRIS
(This article is part of TIMES EXPRESS. It is a condensed version of a story that will appear in tomorrow’s New York Times.)
c.2008 New York Times News Service
Drug and medical device companies should be barred from offering free food, gifts, travel and ghostwriting services to doctors, staff members and students in all 129 of the nation’s medical colleges, an influential college association has concluded.
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The proposed ban is the result of a two-year effort by the Association of American Medical Colleges to create a model policy governing interactions between the schools and industry.
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 ghostwrote 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.
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.
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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.
The chief executives of Pfizer and Eli Lilly dissented from the report’s recommendation regarding speakers’ bureaus.
