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medpundit |
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Monday, April 08, 2002" How tainted by commercial conflicts has medicine become? Heavily, and damagingly so, is the answer. A more important question arises: do those doctors who support this culture for the best of intentions--eg, to undertake important research that would otherwise remain unfunded--have the courage to oppose practices that bring the whole of medicine into disrepute?" They list some pretty damning examples: the American Heart Association's acceptance of $11 million dollars in donations from the maker of a drug whose use they have advocated in a clinical guideline, research that shows authors of guidelines fail to disclose financial ties to companies whose products they recommend, the Seattle cancer center that failed to disclose the financial interests of its researchers in a clinical trial (that one is still being debated), and an editor of a psychiatric journal in Britain who accepted an annual stipend from a drug company then accepted a paper for publication that favored a drug made by that company. A lot of this is circumstantial, to be sure. There is no proof of strict quid pro quo, but do we really want our medical institutions to be financed along the same lines as our politicians? posted by Sydney on 4/08/2002 07:04:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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