We’ve long been puzzled by the opposition to the Massachusetts prescription regulations, since our state’s leadership on this issue was just slightly ahead of the coming wave that will put everyone on record against marketing payments by drug companies to prescribers. We said back in January that the tipping point has been reached, and the tide was becoming a flood.
Now the flood is a deluge. Gardiner Harris reports in today’s New York Times that:
In a scolding report, the nation’s most influential medical advisory group said that doctors should stop taking much of the money, gifts and free drug samples that they routinely accept from drug and device companies.
The report by the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences, is a stinging indictment of many of the most common means by which drug and device makers endear themselves to doctors, medical schools and hospitals.
“It is time for medical schools to end a number of long-accepted relationships and practices that create conflicts of interest, threaten the integrity of their missions and their reputations, and put public trust in jeopardy,” the report concluded.
The institute’s report is even more damning than a similar one released last year by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which proposed tough new rules governing interactions between companies and medical schools.
In the wake of the association’s report, many schools and medical societies toughened their policies. The institute’s imprimatur is certain to accelerate this process.
“With the I.O.M.’s endorsement, issues that were once controversial now are indisputable,” said Dr. David Rothman, president of the Institute on Medicine as a Profession at Columbia University. “Conflicts of interest in medicine are no longer acceptable.”
The Institute of Medicine is the latest in a string of entities and professional groups to recommend restricting gifts and increasing transparency in this arena. For those counting, here are the trend setters (in no particular order):
- MedPAC
- Senators Grassley and Kohl
- Boston University School of Medicine
- UMass Memorial Health Care and UMass Medical School
- Partners Health Care
- Stanford University
- American Psychiatric Association
- Johns Hopkins
- North American Spine Society
- University of Iowa
- The Cleveland Clinic
- Duke
- University of Pennsylvania
- The Association of American Medical Colleges
- National Physician’s Alliance
- The Editors of the New England Journal of Medicine
….and more to come
Georgia J. Maheras,
