Medical students, unite! It’s time to fight for your right to know your profs’ drug-industry ties!
That’s what’s happening over at Harvard, where some 40 students rallied recently on the steps of Harvard Medical School’s Gordon Hall. Along with some folks from Tufts and Boston University, they were waving signs and pushing for tighter conflict-of-interest policies vis-a-vis Harvard docs and pharmaceutical companies, as the Harvard Crimson reports. Doctors’ drug-industry conflicts sure are the topic of the day, what with Sen. Charles Grassley’s latest salvo about an NPR host who’s a psychiatrist.
As the Crimson tells it, students have been trying for six years to get the administration to tighten its conflicts policies, both in the classroom and at the affiliated hospitals where the students train. One idea they’re pushing is to require faculty and students, while talking about drugs in the classroom, to disclose any ties to the makers of those drugs.
Harvard’s dean for faculty and research integrity, Gretchen Brodnicki, told the Crimson the administration is taking the students’ concerns seriously. But she noted some practical issues, especially when it comes to the hospitals, which Harvard does not own or operate. The school can’t “force” affiliated hospitals to change their existing policies to line up with what the medical school requires internally, she said. She added, though, that the hospitals’ policies “go well beyond where we stop.”
Hat Tip: PharmaGossip
Sen. Chuck Grassley is squawking about another eyebrow-raising conflict-of-interest in psychiatry. This tale of drug-industry influence comes with another twist: It involves National Public Radio.
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, a pioneer in transplant medicine, was performing about 600 liver transplants a year in the mid-1980s. But how the mighty can fall. As other U.S. hospitals, including some whose transplant docs trained at UPMC, jumped into the lucrative surgical service, the health system’s volume fell to 132 liver transplants in 2001.
Thursday, November 20, 2008 is the 33rd American Cancer Society
In what could be a major breakthrough for the use of tissue