Drug Company Cash for Doctors — The Tie That Binds?
Should financial ties between doctors and drug companies be eliminated, or are healthy alliances with the common aim of improving human health possible between the two groups? A debate in this week’s PLoS Medicine explores whether the influence of drug company money on doctors is always a corrupting one.
The relationship between doctors and drug companies has been the subject of intense scrutiny, with some arguing that the public health mission of doctors is incompatible with the pharmaceutical industry profit motive. Emma D’Arcy, co-founder of www.myphid.com, an international networking site where healthcare workers and the pharmaceutical industry can communicate in a transparent way, disagrees that the relationship is fundamentally incompatible.
She suggests that "authentic alliances" between doctors and the drug industry can be formed with the common aim of improving human health with safe and effective medicines. Pointing out that the drug industry remains an important source of funding for scientific meetings and continuing medical education, she outlines three ways in which healthy collaboration can exist without the need to further regulate the industry.
These include: teaching medical professionals to distinguish between clinical information and promotional materials; ensuring transparency from both parties through networking sites such as www.myphid.com; and encouraging industry and doctors to follow an "everyday credo" to make sure interactions ultimately benefit people living with disease and further medical scientific understanding.
Ray Moynihan of the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, argues that transparency is not enough to ensure that physicians’ prescribing behavior is not distorted by pharmaceutical influence. He cites evidence collected on the site of the non-profit group Healthy Skepticism (www.healthyskepticism.org), which includes a systematic review demonstrating that studies sponsored by pharmaceutical companies were more likely to have outcomes favoring the sponsor.
Moynihan calls for the medical profession to disentangle itself completely from the money it accepts from the pharmaceutical industry. He points to the pharmaceutical industry distortion of continuing medical education, in particular the ability of doctors to gain professional credits at company-sponsored events. Giving examples of education for doctors in Australia where sponsors have even determined topics and speakers for seminars, he concludes that there should be a complete ban on all industry funding of continuing medical education, whether direct or indirect.
Complete disentanglement is a healthier alternative, argues Moynihan, and strategies such as the American Medical Student Associations "PharmFree" campaign, which has advocated severing all financial ties, presage "a future where fewer doctors will be prescribing under the influence of industry."
SOURCE:Â PLoS Medicine, July 20, 2009