- Location
- Montclair, NJ
It is, and rightfully so ( see my above comment on the AMA's guidelines and my dean ). If anyone is interested, PM me and I will send you some articles that we used for this topic discussion in school. Most of it was directed at doctors accepting gifts. A more contentious, and bigger, problem than your average MD accepting the lunch and pens is when researchers ( many of whom are pHD's and not MD's ) dont disclose their connections and/or funding sources from pharmaceutical companies in their papers. A study showed that this greatly influenced ( whether openly funded or not ) the outcome of the research. Dom, I think you'd be interested in that one.
Yeah the whole "Medical Education" part of a drugs clinical development life is real shady. I think it is that way because it costs so much to run these drug candidates through the clinical trials that only pharma companies can afford to pay for them. Generic houses get off real easy. To me the generic companies are the biggest thieves. They take someone else's life work, reverse engineer it and make billions off of it without putting anything remotely close in terms of finances into development that the pharma company did. On average a pharma company has a drug on market 5-7 years (I think) before they are in danger of losing patent. That is a small window to try and make all of your money back and some.