Separate doctors from industry - The Boston Globe

The medical/pharmaceutical industry influence on academic medicine is ubiquitous. In 2007, a survey of academic department chairs published in the Journal of the American Medical Association revealed that 60 percent reported some form of personal relationship with industry, including as a consultant, paid speaker, officer, founder, or member of a board.

While many of these relationships are appropriate, an increasing number go off-track. Later that same year, the Department of Justice filed criminal complaints against four of the five medical device manufacturers in New Jersey, alleging that the companies used consulting agreements with orthopedic surgeons as inducements to use a particular company’s products. According to Justice, the investigation revealed it was common practice that surgeons “were paid tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for consulting contracts and were often lavished with trips and other expensive perquisites.’’

More recently, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa has investigated research conflicts of interests at numerous teaching hospitals and academic medical centers, including Harvard Medical School. In October of 2008, an article in the the New York Times noted that Grassley’s findings “suggest that universities are all but incapable of policing their faculty’s conflicts of interest.’’ Eric Campbell, a health policy researcher at Mass General and Harvard Medical School, called these consulting arrangements, “one of the great wink-winks of all time.’’

via boston.com

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