… these healthy, long overdue policies on their own,” says Sidney Wolfe of Public Citizen.
So students have to do it.
Kind of a disgusting situation, reminding UD of Wyoming’s university students, who, because the state refuses to do anything about diploma mills, have gone on their own to the legislature to plead for reform. When greedy faculty and administrators won’t do anything about the corruption that feeds them, students, who have plenty of other things to do with their time, have to deal with it:
[Medical students were] increasingly put off by school policies that allowed drug companies to market their products to doctors and faculty members.
“We see all these pharma sales reps in clinics with free lunches and marketing paraphernalia giving us the hard sell,” [said one student].
The New York Times article describes pharma’s ” longtime practice of providing free food, gifts and educational seminars to trainees.”
Students are still young enough to be offended by this corrupt practice; faculty and administration at most med schools (see AMSA’s scorecard) are perfectly okay with it.
Like HASA (see below), AMSA is an organization willing to intervene in a deeply entrenched and deeply greedy system. This blog will track both efforts.
June 3rd, 2008 at 8:03AM
A topic well worth tracking.
Sunshine is the best disinfectant – as your FIRE friends like to say.
June 4th, 2008 at 2:29PM
AMSA has been worked on many issues important to students, and has been in existence for over 50 years.
http://www.amsa.org/news/presskit.cfm
June 4th, 2008 at 2:48PM
Paige: Thank you for that correction. I’ll amend the post.