Pharma Ad sparks controversy

We haven’t talked much about how the pharmaceutical company markets through advertising to providers in academic journals.  But a new wide-spread ad highlights the issue with industry funding continuing medical education (CME).  This ad counters reports and recommendations from the Institute of Medicine, Medpac and several other authoritative bodies to reduce and eventually eliminate the role of industry funded CME.

Dr. Daniel Carlat writes on his blog:

Current Psychiatry has been publishing a series of deceptive ads that appear to be patriotic calls for freedom of the press, but which in reality are stealth endorsements of industry-funded CME, paid for by drug companies and medical education companies.

… there are a few paragraphs of gibberish stating that information is important for quality health care (that’s true, that’s why I went to medical school and keep up on the medical literature) and how “Congress and academia are seeking to restrict the content of CME” and how this somehow amounts to “restrictions on how much information consumers and doctors can know about current and new treatments….”

At the end, in small italicized print, we read: “This message is brought to you as a public service by the Coalition for Healthcare Communication.”

To find out who is the “public” benefiting from their “service”, surf on over to their website. It is simply a repository of political ammunition for medical education companies who are on their last ditch stand defending their business model, which depends on getting drug companies, rather than our doctors, to pay for CME.

I am hardly the first physician to be outraged by this stealth ad. Michael Herbert, a primary care doctor and blogger, posted this analysis of the ad that is so nicely written it became an “editor’s pick” of OpenSalon magazine.

Entitling his article “The Secret Defense of CME,” Dr. Herbert concludes his piece thusly:

“Unsurprisingly, this campaign underscores what is wrong with CME funding. You can’t tell where the money is coming from. This makes it difficult to interpret the message, or measure the bias. If Big Pharma and drug marketers can’t defend their CME practices without disguising them in cryptic constitutional arguments, it is hard to see them presenting CME in a way that would allow doctors to clearly evaluate bias.

This is not an ad for freedom of speech. It is an ad for secrecy. And secrecy in a scientific discipline is not a good thing.”

Massachusetts gifts ban and disclosure law put a firewall between industry funding and CMEs.  Looks like we put it up just in time.
-Georgia Maheras