JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association) has published a survey of the links between Medical Schools and the pharmaceutical industry in the US.
They found that 60% of departmental heads had a financial relationship with a drug company as a consultant, member of a scientific advisory board, a paid speaker, an officer, a founder, or a member of the board of directors.
Two thirds of departments at medical schools and large teaching hospitals had relationships with industry that involved research equipment, unrestricted funds, support for research seminars, residency and fellowship training, continuing medical education programmes, discretionary funds to buy food and drink, support for professional meetings, subscriptions to professional journals, and intellectual property licensing.
Overall, they say, 80% of clinical departments and 43% of non-clinical departments had at least one tie with industry.
Now, I don’t know about you, but that concerns me. That’s an awful lot of influence. What do you think the teachers think about it?
Despite these ties “more than two thirds of all chairs with a personal relationship with industry reported that their personal relationships had no effect on the various types of departmental functions. A similar percentage claimed that there was no effect on their personal financial status,” the authors say.
No problem. Nothing to see. Move along there………..
Heroes Not Zombies 
Bob, what do you mean by “No problem. Nothing to see. Move along there”? are you being sarcastic?
I think it’s a big problem and there is an influence of course! maybe unintentional but that doesn’t make it better.
ah, yes, sugarmouse, I find it totally amazing that people can think this is not a problem. The point about the people in charge thinking it wasn’t a problem is astonishing!
I can remember years ago my partner in one of the GP practices I worked in never took favours from drug company reps – apart from the one who always got him a free ticket to the annual “Five Nations” rugby tournament. He was convinced that accepting this would not influence his prescribing. I remember us sitting down reading the prescribing statistics for our city and finding out that our practice was one of the top prescribers of the very drug this friendly rep was promoting. We both stopped seeing reps that very day.
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