How to hold Pharma - free meetings

The American Medical Student Association’s Pharm-Free Campaign and PharmedOut.org announce the release of a guide “How to Hold Pharma-Free Meetings” for holding independent, industry-free grand rounds, meetings, and conferences.

At most academic medical centers, pharmaceutical companies fund food, speaker travel and honoraria for grand rounds and other educational conferences for physicians and physicians-in-training. None of the academic medical centers that have banned pharmaceutical company gifts to physicians have banned industry-funded educational events.

The practical motivation of satisfying industry sponsors prevents the independent discussion of medical therapies. “How to Hold Pharma-Free Meetings” provides practical tips on how to break industry’s grip on medical education and is available at :

http://www.pharmedout.org/PharmaFreeMeetingTipsWeb.pdf.

The American Medical Student Association’s Pharm-Free Campaign encourages medical students and physicians to refuse money, gifts, or hospitality from the pharmaceutical industry; to seek out objective sources of information; and to avoid conflicts of interest in medical education and practice.

PharmedOut is an independent, publicly funded project that empowers physicians to identify and counter inappropriate pharmaceutical promotion practices. News, slideshows and other teaching tools, and more than 300 credits of pharma-free CME are available at our website.