Medical Group Fights Industry Influence

The Association of American Medical Colleges has proposed that 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 nation’s medical colleges. The Association has begun to write a model policy governing relationships between the schools and industry. While medical schools can ignore the association’s advice, most follow its recommendations.
The rules would apply only to medical schools, but they could have enormous influence across medicine, according to medical educators.
Drug companies spend billions of dollars each year trying to influence doctors. Medical schools, with prominent professors and new trainees are attractive marketing targets.
For decades companies have provided faculty and students free food and gifts, offered lucrative consulting arrangements to teachers and even ghost-wrote research papers for busy professors.
A group of doctors criticized these practices in a 2006 article in The Journal of the American Medical Association, and said that medical schools should ban them.
The proposed rules would require that schools set up centralized systems for accepting free drug samples and suggest that schools audit independently accredited medical education seminars given by faculty. The rules would apply to faculty even when off-duty or away from school.
Speakers’ fees and drug samples are a major part of the drug and device industry’s marketing operations, and many medical school professors have resisted efforts to restrict them.
These efforts to remove the influence of industry marketing from medical decision making shoiuld be applauded.