Greedy Trial Lawyer
"No Drug Left Behind" Is The Policy Of Physician CME
Category: Gaming The System
The chore of teaching doctors how to practice medicine has been handed to the pharmaceutical industry. As a result, dangerous side effects are rarely on the curriculum.
With these words from the Op-Ed page of the New York Times we better understand why No Drug Left Behind is the prevailing policy of the medical profession. Even stinko drugs that kill and injure thousands are praised and touted by docs to docs.
Here is how it works:
Diagnosis: Conflict of Interest
Most states require that doctors obtain a minimum number of credit hours of continuing medical education each year to maintain their medical licenses. Not so long ago, most of these courses were produced and paid for by universities and medical associations. But this has changed drastically over the past decade.According to the most recent data available from the national organization in charge of accrediting the courses, drug-industry financing of continuing medical education has nearly quadrupled since 1998, from $302 million to $1.12 billion. Half of all continuing medical education courses in the United States are now paid for by drug companies, up from a third a decade ago. Because pharmaceutical companies now set much of the agenda for what doctors learn about drugs, crucial information about potential drug dangers is played down, to the detriment of patient care.
Education that doubles as advertising for drug companies occurs in all branches of medicine.
Drug companies don't directly pay doctors to teach courses. Instead, they pay someone else to cut the checks. Similarly, the drug companies don't explicitly tell doctors to say good things about their products. Instead, they hire a company to write good things about their products and to pay doctors to deliver the messages.
These shenanigans were recently spotlighted by Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, and Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, of the Senate Finance Committee. In April, their committee released a report, two years in the making, concluding that drug companies have used educational grants unethically as a way of marketing their products.
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