A recent editorial and opinion piece addressed the issue of gifts and donations from pharmaceutical and medical device companies to physicians and academic health centers. Summaries appear below.Los Angeles Times: Pharmaceutical companies for decades have "lavished gifts on doctors," and "there's growing evidence" that the practice "is migrating to the fast-growing medical device industry," a Times editorial states. "At best, questionable financial relationships such as these dilute the public's faith in doctors. At worst, they may be putting patients' lives at risk," the editorial states, adding, "Like the pharmaceutical industry before it, the medical device industry has agreed to a voluntary code of ethics that bans most industry gifts to doctors. But voluntary guidelines aren't enough, and few companies are paying attention." The editorial concludes, "As baby boomers age, the industry is set for a huge financial windfall. For their own good as well as that of their patients, doctors and manufacturers must clean up their act" (Los Angeles Times, 2/21).

Thomas Stossel, Wall Street Journal: A recent Journal of the American Medical Association article that criticizes the influence pharmaceutical and medical device companies have on academic health centers includes "debatable allegations" that "are not new," but the article has "received widespread and enormously favorable attention in the press," Stossel, an American Cancer Society professor at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the division of hematology at Brigham and Women's Hospital, writes in a Journal opinion piece. According to Stossel, "The JAMA piece reminds us that industry marketing influences the prescribing habits of physicians. But it repeatedly neglects documented evidence that physicians frequently fail to prescribe appropriate drugs according to evidence-based guidelines for nearly all diseases." He adds that the article proposes "extreme remedies that promise great but practically unattainable rewards." Stossel writes, "Rather than focus" on investment into science and technology, "some medical academic leaders indulge precious time and effort on a strange visceral aversion to entrepreneurial profit. They want to inflict on academic health centers top-down management policies that have a dismal track record for product development" (Stossel, Wall Street Journal, 2/21).


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