Drugmaker/Doctor Conflict of Interest

Last week, Stanford University announced that it will severely restrict industry financing of doctors’ continuing education at its medical school. The school’s new policy stems from concern about the influence drug companies may have on medical education.
Most doctors in the United States must take annual refresher courses that drug makers have long paid for. While the industry says its money is intended solely to keep doctors up to date, critics charge that companies agree to support only classes that promote their products.
Stanford will no longer let drug and device companies specify which courses they wish to finance. Instead, companies will be asked to contribute only to a general pool of money that can be used for any class, even ones that never mention a company’s products.
Stanford is the sixth major medical school to form a pool for university contributions to medical education, according to the Prescription Project, a nonprofit organization that largely opposes industry financing of medical education. The others are the Universities of Massachusetts, Pittsburgh, Colorado, Kansas and California Davis. One institution, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, has banned all industry support for its doctor classes.
Last June, the Association of American Medical Colleges recommended that medical schools pool contributions from companies as a means of shielding teachers from commercial influences.
The policy comes in the wake of growing scrutiny of industry financing of doctor education. In April 2007, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, issued a report that documented how drug makers used the classes to increase sales of their latest products. Since Senator Grassley began his investigation, a growing number of drug makers have begun to make public their lists of educational grant recipients. Drugmaker and Pfizer recently announced that it would no longer directly support commercial medical education companies, which deliver many of the classes that doctors attend and may be more susceptible to industry influence than ones based at medical schools.
Doctors have grown accustomed to taking educational classes free — often with a lunch included. Separating commercial influences from doctor education might require doctors to pay their own way, which some doctors have said they would resist.