Splitting the Difference: Workshops Highlight Industry, Medical Relationships - NYTimes.com

By DUFF WILSON

Two conferences in coming weeks are featuring starkly different views on the (a) harms or (b) benefits of interactions between the pharmaceutical industry and the doctors, researchers and journal editors who shape medical care.

Georgetown University is sponsoring its second “PharmedOut” conference on June 16 and 17 with a lineup of some of the industry’s leading and best-informed critics, including Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School.

Meanwhile, on July 22, a nonprofit group called the Association of Clinical Researchers and Educators, or A.C.R.E., is holding its second conference since its founding in 2009, to explain the reasons to support collaborations between the industry and doctors.

At next week’s conference, Dr. Angell, who discusses reasons for the explosion of mental health drugs in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, believes many conflicts-of-interest should be banned, not just disclosed.

The Georgetown conference also features Dr. Carl Elliott, the University of Minnesota professor and bioethicist who is under attack at his own university for raising questions about a medical experiment there, and Dr. Virginia Barbour, chief editor of PLoS Medicine, an “open-access journal” and free Web site from the Public Library of Science.

The organizer of the Georgetown conference, Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, a Georgetown University associate medical professor, says it will cover some of the newer issues emerging in medical conflicts-of-interest. These include the role of drug company employees known as medical-science liaisons and the influences brought to bear on pharmacy benefit managers.

The PharmedOut agenda is here.

The second conference was co-founded by Dr. Thomas P. Stossel, a professor at Harvard Medical School and director of translational medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He has seen himself as a sometimes lonely voice to speak in favor of industry collaborations with researchers and medical schools.
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Dr. Stossel argues that the financial aid and research interactions benefit patients and advance science. He will lead a panel called, “Academia/Industry Collaboration: Why is it under attack by politicians, deans and the media?”

Other A.C.R.E. panels will discuss what industry, patients and medical students should do to push back against the type of thinking generally represented at the Georgetown conference. Dr. Michael A. Weber, a professor at SUNY Downstate Medical Center College of Medicine and a former president of the American Society of Hypertension, talks about A.C.R.E.’s upcoming plans.

The July meeting will be held at Cornell Medical Center in New York. Its agenda is here.

Both conferences are open to the public.

via prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com

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