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medpundit |
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Tuesday, November 18, 2003So it is not merely that the pharmaceutical industry is using doctors to sell its products. Medical schools and other educational institutions are not teaching doctors how to use drugs wisely and conservatively. Until they insist that the pharmaceutical industry stick to its own business (which can include advertising but not education), we are unlikely to get the help we need from our doctors in controlling runaway drug expenditures. I don't know about medical schools today, since it's been nearly twenty years since I was a student. (I don't remember drug companies at my medical school. They were in the hospitals, but not the school, so pharmacology was taught without their influence.) But, it's certainly true that today's continuing medical education is dominated by the drug industry. It's getting increasingly harder to find a conference that offers speakers without a pharmaceutical company sponsorship. And sometimes, the promotion of a drug is so blatant, it leaves everyone in the audience shaking their heads. It's definitely a problem that should be addressed somehow. Over at Business Word, the suggestion is to pay doctors to go to non-pharmaceutical sponsored lectures. That probably wouldn't go over well with the public - using tax dollars to educate a class of people most considered pampered to begin with. And, the problem goes deeper than sponsorship of meetings. Most researchers and academics support their work with grants from pharmaceutical companies. No matter what the venue, they're likely to have a bias toward their particular sponsor. If public money must be used, then perhaps it should be used for funding research grants and to support residency training programs so they wouldn't have to rely on the pharmaceutical industry. Don's also asking if the healthcare voucher proposal put forth in this op-ed would serve us better than our current system. He thinks it would. There's no way of knowing without trying it, but as a system that's divorced from employment and that would require insurance companies to offer catastrophic coverage it sounds like a good start. posted by Sydney on 11/18/2003 09:23:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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