It’s hard to keep a good shill down. Ignoring explicit conflict of interest policies, at least twelve hucksters who teach at Stanford University’s medical school are still at it, trading their institution’s prestige for tens of thousands of dollars from drug companies each semester.
A public interest group pointed this rule-breaking out to do-nothing Stanford, which is apparently – in response to growing press interest in the scandal – slowly beginning to discipline these people.
As long as universities consider it not quite the done thing to call its pitchmen and pitchwomen out on their sales careers, COI policies will remain a joke.
… reviews the still pretty pathetic pharma-dependency issues at American medical schools.
The University of Wisconsin Pain and Policy Studies Group has decided to stop taking drug money. This decision, apparently motivated by an exposé in the local paper, coincides with a huge new federal attack on prescription drug abuse. The Wisconsin group has taken about
$2.5 million over a decade from companies that make opioids. The money came while the group pushed for what critics say was a pharmaceutical industry agenda not supported by rigorous science: the liberalized use of narcotic painkillers for non-cancer chronic pain…. The UW Pain Group may have helped pave the way for OxyContin’s widespread use.
Oh, and
… research papers and medical articles written by UW Pain Group officials often did not disclose the group’s funding from drug companies or that those individuals were paid personally by drug companies.
Dan Berrett, at Inside Higher Ed, updates us on the corruption of the field of economics, and the profession’s glacial pace toward ethics and conflict of interest policies.
… [T]he Academy Award-winning documentary “Inside Job” has cast a harsh light on the chumminess of regulators, bond raters and bankers — and on the academic economists who were supposed to have rendered disinterested advice and analysis.
… [If] an ethics code and conflict of interest policy were to be adopted, …economists would state relevant sources of financial support, or ownership stakes in firms that might benefit as a result of policies they are advocating when writing op-eds or testifying in front of Congress.
[E]conomists at top programs, such as Harvard, Princeton and Stanford, share a somewhat common perspective and ideology about financial markets and regulation — and … professors from these departments also tend to get consulting work at private firms or at government agencies, thus circulating a fairly consistent ideology throughout the most influential agencies and universities.
There’s seems to be a kind of weird double-tracking going on in academic economics at the moment. Economists are either mooning over their own math (“[T]he central cause of the profession’s failure [to predict the economic collapse] was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess,” writes Paul Krugman.) or lusting after corporate liaisons. Either way, you’ve got a lot of academics distracted from respectable intellectual work.
“Eventually we have to ask if professors such as Dean Hubbard do the things that they are exposed to be doing in the film, do we want such people to be the deans of our business school, where we teach 21st-century ethics and responsibility courses?” Yu asked.
“No one is holy here,” she added. “We have to think whom do we want [at Columbia], not just bend to authority because people happen to be the dean.”
A grad student at Columbia University, a member of the Student Affairs Committee of the Faculty Senate, reviews the Business School dean’s performance in Inside Job. She doesn’t like it.
Conflict of interest at universities is one of those things. It’s what Samuel Beckett called a tragicomedy.
Universities make a big fuss about COIs paperworkwise, and hotairwise, but at any given time significant numbers of faculty members in med and business schools and economics departments are way out of compliance with COI and disclosure policies. They’re consulting here, they’re consulting there, they’re consulting everywhere.
Their model, their king, their god, their guru, their gold standard, is the last president of Harvard. As Frank Rich notes:
[Lawrence] Summers [did] consulting work for [a] hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors, from 2004 to 2006, while still president of Harvard.
That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution … would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time. [Summers was] moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university.
If it’s good enough for the president of Harvard, it’s good enough for me!
These guys are very competitive. As long as they’re not making the five million or so Summers made from his one-day-a-week consulting job, they’re going to keep at it.
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Columbia University has its share of non-disclosing and possibly conflicted professors, but, as the title of this post indicates, it has lax COI policies.
Two of its COI-challenged professors have starring roles in the documentary film The Inside Job, however, and seeing as how the film won an Oscar and all, a lot of people have watched it, and Columbia, says one administrator, is embarrassed. So on Friday the faculty senate’s going to gather and watch the film (the filmmaker, Charles Ferguson, will be there to answer questions afterwards). And almost certainly Columbia will, shortly after that, alter its COI policies.
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UD thanks Roy for the link.
UD‘s buddy Bill Gleason reminds us that the business of pharmaceutical companies paying professors to write books – or to put their names on books written by ghost-writing companies – continues to thrive. (Pharma also has professors put their names on articles largely or entirely written by the same ghost-writing companies.) Like all ghostly things, this one leads a fitful existence; occasionally there’s a reported sighting. But you can’t be sure you’ve seen a ghost until you get documentation, and in this case, people have been trying to get documentation out of the American Psychiatric Association, which published the book…
On May 4, there’ll be a day-long workshop, at the University of Toronto, on the ethics of ghostwriting. David Healy will be there, along with other academics who’ve been willing to go up against powerful and rich vested interests, inside the university and out.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel takes a look at an academic unit of the University of Wisconsin — the Pain and Policy Studies Group.
…[D]octors in the addiction and pain fields say the [University of Wisconsin] Pain Group pushed a pharmaceutical industry agenda not supported by rigorous science.
“They advocate for policies that benefit pharmaceutical companies and harm pain patients and the public health,” said Andrew Kolodny, an expert on opioid addiction.
… Their efforts helped create a climate that vastly expanded unproven medical use of the often abused drugs, said Kolodny, chairman of psychiatry at the Maimonides Medical Center in New York.
The group gets bundles from the relevant drug companies, though they’re a little spotty about disclosure.
Just to remind you:
… [Opioids] became so common that in 2007, 700 milligrams of morphine or its equivalent were prescribed, on average, for everyone in the country.
That’s enough to give every man, woman and child round-the-clock dosing of Vicodin for three weeks.
Unintentional overdose deaths from opioid analgesics grew from 2,901 in 1999 to 11,499 in 2007, by far eclipsing deaths from heroin and cocaine combined. Opioid deaths follow a track that is almost identical to the growth in sales of the drugs. In addition, an estimated 1.9 million people abused the drugs or had dependence problems between 2007 and 2009.
You know, Joseph Stiglitz (among others) has been warning about the effects of gross wealth disparity in the United States.
The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent… While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades — and more — has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.
Look at many American universities – especially their sports and medical components – to see how outrageous and growing wealth-concentration has corrupted and distorted that institution… That sad institution, to which we continue, sheep-like, to give our tax dollars because somehow, like its comrade-in-intellectuality, the NCAA, it’s non-profit… Harvard’s endowment may stand at around thirty billion dollars, its last president may have pursued a multiply-millioned hedgie career while running the place, some of its highest-profile professors may spend more time cultivating client dictators than they do teaching, but Harvard deserves the taxes of every one of those middle-class losers with their falling incomes…
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And speaking of consulting, here’s the University of Nevada and its system of med schools and hospitals on the front page of today’s New York Times. After a heart device company began paying monthly fees of $5,000 to various med school professors there, the university started using that company’s device. The hospital’s CEO didn’t know and didn’t care about this conflict of interest, although now that the federal government is investigating these matters, and, you know, right after the main faculty money-maker was “contacted by this reporter,” the faculty member told the pathetic CEO about the money (‘“We never delved into that level of the relationship,” [the CEO] said.’).
We’re talking here in particular about William Resh, who describes the $60,000 a year or so he gets from the device maker as “nominal.”
Which takes us back to Stiglitz. If you’re in the one percent, money that would look not at all bad as a yearly salary for the failing middle class is nominal, nothing, eh, fluff, nada, peanuts, funny money. I guess that’s why the CEO didn’t delve. Pocket change. Who cares.
… in an Economic Principals post about Harvard professors and lucrative international consulting. The first claims that Lawrence Summers lost Harvard’s presidency in part because of his involvement in the Andrei Shleifer scandal:
After its mission to advise the Russian government on behalf of the US State department collapsed in 1997 amid a welter of conflict of interest charges, Harvard closed its Institute for International Development. After losing a long court battle [and having to pay the government tens of millions of dollars as a result], and partly as a consequence of it, the university relieved Lawrence Summers of his presidency (but made him a university professor) and revoked economics professor Andrei Shleifer’s endowed chair.
This is the first time UD‘s read someone connecting Summers’ loss of the presidency to the Shleifer case. I certainly hope it’s true, because I’ve been baffled for years, reading the details of that scandal, as to why Summers suffered no consequences. But maybe he did.
The second returns us to the much-discussed question of the Harvard-dominated Monitor Group, and its ties to Gaddafi:
In a statement last week, Monitor wrote that “just a few years ago many saw a period of promise in Libya.” That was certainly true in Cambridge. What dissenting Libyans in Tripoli witnessed was a parade of well-paid visitors flattering their half-mad dictator, and a squad of Harvard-connected consultants bent on creating a National Security Organization for the government, designed to augment the existing security apparatus with a new corps of MBA-trained personnel officers.
It does look pretty unseemly… Richly rewarded Harvard professors pumping up an extremely, I may almost say ostentatiously (to quote Lady Bracknell) half-mad dictator…
In 2006, a psychiatrist who wrote to the Journal of the American Medical Association about conflicts of interest among many of its authors heard back from an editor there. Conflict of interest? WTF?
So conflicted doctors hook your patients on drugs that fuck them up. So?
[In my practice, I see] young men who have breast lesions and abnormal breast development from atypical antipsychotics; [I see the results of financially motivated prescription] in sudden unexpected deaths, or “suds,” from psychiatric drugs in individuals who had no risk factors for sudden death; in tic and dyskinetic movement disorders in kids arbitrarily prescribed stimulants, and the huge weight gain and symptoms of type 2 diabetes in children and young adults who receive a sedative, such as quetiapine, for sleep.
So?
… in this suit.
Harming patients through over-drugging is a small price to pay for happy hours with the Lakers.
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Do you have high-prescribers on your medical faculty?
Sure, it’s none of your business — it’s a privacy issue. Fine.
But it might be worth looking into if you want to avoid getting your university’s name dragged into cases like this one.
According to a new study:
… [Of] 29 reviews, or “meta-analyses,” of earlier drug trials — culled from top journals like JAMA and The Lancet — only two reported who had funded the original trials included in the review.
And none of the reviews mentioned whether the authors reporting on those trials had been paid by drugmakers.
… [M]ore than two-thirds of the original drug trials that ended up being included in the 29 reviews were funded by pharmaceutical companies.
Only 318 of the 509 trials reviewed gave the conflict-of-interest information in the first place.
… When the [research] team contacted the reviewers, the majority admitted they hadn’t even looked at the issue.