A psychiatry professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin knows that less is more. In a short opinion piece about medical school professors hawking new drugs and devices, he simply reviews the numbers. The corruption of academic medicine is so grotesque that this is all he needs to do.
… Because of pharmaceutical promotions, doctors have written billions of dollars in unnecessary or ineffective prescriptions. In the past five years, seven pharmaceutical companies have been prosecuted by the Department of Justice for their marketing practices and fined a collective total of more than $5.8 billion. Device manufacturers also have been prosecuted and, as part of their settlement, now must publish online their payments to surgeons.
Industry provides many important health care innovations. Medicine must do a better job of redefining its relationship with industry to maintain trust with our patients.
November 5th, 2009 at 7:43PM
Dr. Chan is responding to an op-ed by the well known Harvard Belly-ACRE co-founder Dr. Thomas Stossel.
Honesty is brief, smokescreens take longer.