How Does Pharma Influence Affect Professionalism?
In the January issue of the GME e-Letter, we referenced an editorial by Arnold S. Relman, MD in the Dec. 12 JAMA that decries the decline of medical professionalism resulting from the growing commercialization of US health care, including the influence of the pharmaceutical industry: This industry now uses its enormous financial resources to help shape the postgraduate and continuing medical education of physicians in ways that serve its marketing purposes. Physicians and medical educational institutions aid and abet this influence by accepting, sometimes even soliciting, financial help and other favors from the industry, thus relinquishing what should be their professional responsibility for self-education. A medical profession that is being educated by an industry that sells the drugs physicians prescribe and other tools physicians use is abdicating its ethical commitment to serve as the independent fiduciary for its patients. In response, we received the following feedback from read
