Med Students Get Free Sushi And Filet Mignon
3 CommentsBy Ed Silverman // June 3rd, 2007 // 11:43 am
Last summer, the Association of American Medical Colleges formed a task force to produce guidelines about freebies. A recent paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association called for academic medical centers - medical schools and affiliated teaching hospitals - to ban gifts and free meals from industry reps. And the American Medical Student Association is promoting a “PharmFree” campaign urging students to refuse free meals and gifts.
Some universities are responding, but as The Baltimore Sun notes, the freebies just keep on coming…
· Med student Clarence Lam marveled at the feast that Novartis sponsored this spring at the Inner Harbor’s upscale Capital Grille. The night’s appetizer was seafood, the entree was filet mignon and dessert was cheesecake. “They paid for everything,” recalls Lam, 26, who attends the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “They even covered the wine.”
· Julia Skapik, 28, a fourth-year student at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, recalls one professor regularly provided sushi lunches in his office. “You get like $100 of sushi, and the drug companies pay for it,” she says. The same doc invited students to a dinner sponsored by Pfizer, which was promoting its Gideon schizophrenia med, and the professor was a speaker at the event. “It was a lavish dinner, about three hours long,” Skapik says. “I thought, ‘I can’t believe this is happening. Does no one else think this is weird?’”
· Sarah Sharfstein, 31, has been offered a variety of goodies, though she just finished her second year at the University of Maryland and has spent most of her time in the classroom. In one class on diagnosing neurological problems, a doctor handed out free reflex hammers, courtesy of a drugmaker. “Our professors don’t need to disclose their financial relationships to us or their patients,” she says. “So we don’t know where they are coming from.”
You can read the full story here.
sawitinaction
Here is the reality: All the industry regulatory bodies, medical community associations, some medical schools (soon all will have) and the drug companies themselves have appropriate regulations and guidelines to limit drug industry’s influence via “incentives”.These rules also specify what is allowed and that is really very minimal and would not stimulate anyone to do something because they got this “allowed” incentive.
This is where the old proverbial “rules are made to be broken” comes into play. The drug companies have done this for decades but especially since the pharma industry bacame the big pharma with enormous amounts of money to throw around, of course for their benefit to sell, sell and sell more of their drugs.
As for doctors, they are as human as anyone of us,. How long can one say no to all those benefits the big pharma is offering to all, from prescribin doctors to future ones, the students.
Those who apologise on the behalf of big pharma by saying how they all stick with the rules, are either outright lying or do not know what they are talking about. Or are some of those who for instance get paid thousands for their “educatonal” talks or are sent with all expenses paid to far corners of the globe to medical meetings and such.
The examples here are typical. Novartis is one of the biggest spenders and very generous one. How do you think Diovan became the No 1, ARB on the market in spite having no advantages over Avapro, Cozaar, Atacand or any other ARB, for they all are proven to be equally effective at equipotent doses.
The difference was that Novartis knew and knows how to “market” much better by all those extras they do for their potential customers.
This will go on and on for the whole big pharma industry does it and there ain’t anyone who can do anything about it. Or maybe can??
anniepema
If you have a price Big Pharma will buy you. There are very few Steve Nissens, Anne L. Peters and Ron Pauls in our world today.
knowsnovartisinside
Right anniepem. Look at the strory about that senator who hid his bribe $$ in the fridge. He figured it was “cool” to take that bribe so he kept it “cool” in place no one looks ever, like fridge. How moronic can you get. The big pharma and doctors who take the bribe are much more smart. The bribes are always designed to resemble the normal, legal payments or benefits (paid honrarium for talk $5000 instead of usual $1000 and so on) so no one can tell it is not “cool”. The list of corruptive methods is as long as one can immagine and the new methods are invented daily by those highly paid brains at big pharma.
The senator would never been caught if he choose the big pahrma to do what he did for others.
Does this mean we have some lawmakers who have not been exposed? Interesting??