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In this recent piece from Howard Brody MD of the Hooked blog about how the American Psychiatric Association (APA) recently voted to eliminate pharmaceutical industry funding of educational symposia as well as free meals etc. from their annual meeting, he asks what they will do to pay for their education. I am not involved in the politics of the APA (or any other organization, for that matter, not that I shouldn’t be based on my research accomplishments, but maby they just think I am a curmudgeon or something. And neither me nor Mrs. Bremner have ever gotten one of those lifetime achievement awards).
The last time I went to an APA meeting it was in New York several years ago and I took my daughter so we could have a bonding experience and see the sights. I typically have gone to the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNPee pee) which doesn’t have overt drug sales displays but which is perhaps a more covert form of drug company coercion after all, so I am going to have to look into doing something at APA given these new rules (and forgoing ACNP). Good job guys. And hat tip to Danny Carlat who has gotten involved in the internal politics of education within the APA and surely must have played a role in this decision.
The fact is that the APA is the first medical organization to make such a move and hats off to them. Let’s celebrate.
Yeah! The wicked drug company is dead!
Howard quoted someone from the APA saying that without drug companies they would have to hold their lectures at the YMCA. Well I think I have a pretty good analogy for you. For one of our NIH funded grants we added as a consultant Lori Davis MD of the Tuscaloosa VA and the University of Alabama Birmingham Department of Psychiatry. Lori came over to Atlanta and gave a lecture on “Diagnosis and Treatment of PTSD” and then met with our staff and fellows to review diagnostic assessments of PTSD. She will return in May. The lecture was delivered in the auditorium of the old Georgia Mental Hospital which is now owned by Emory and called Emory Briarcliff. Not the Ritz, but no overhead, free, easy, and free of commercial influence. Isn’t that the way it should be?
- No, this is not a Stalinist era building in East Berlin. This where Dr. Davis Gave her pharma-free lecture on PTSD, and the home of corporate headquarters for the Drug Safety and Health News Blog
We’d be happy to have some more pharma free CME if you don’t mind our humble quarters. We could get our pals within driving distance to come over and give a lecture. Hell I’d be glad to give a lecture where someone doesn’t tell ‘Go out and sell some Paxil Doug!’ Ya’ll come over and let’s have us a pig pickin!’
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Good. No free dinners for the “little guys”.
I hope the next step is stopping pharma-ghost-written papers, payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars to influential-publishing-doctor researchers, payments to doctors who prescribe certain drugs, testing of drugs against competitor drugs which are used at less than optimal dose, payments to medical journals by pharma, etc. I am sure I have omitted a lot in that list.
For the psychiatry field everything is dead now except for the payment to medical journals. They still haven’t fessed up about who they get money from and how much. Which illustrates the recent hypocrisy of JAMA. Other than that your list is complete. However my MD colleagues in other fields seem to think everything is business as usual and A-OK. They need to have the hammer come down on them as well.
Did you see this? :
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/technology/internet/26privacy.html?hp
This article discusses RealAge, a company that established a free online health quiz which has been taken by 27 million people as a result of being promoted on the Oprah Winfrey show. RealAge has carefully concealed from the public that they are a clearinghouse for direct sales emails from Pfizer, Novartis, and GlaxoSmithKline.
“At the end of the day, if you want to reach males over 60 that are high blood pressure sufferers in northwest Buffalo with under $50,000 household income that also have a high risk of diabetes, you could,” he said. (Andy Mikulak, the vice president for marketing at RealAge)
Doug,
Maybe after Biederman gets his butt thrown into federal prison, these boys will be even less likely to be on the take.
Seems to me that it may be “too little, too late” for some of them – I hope so.
Duane
Thanks, therapy patient. I just posted on this.
You’re welcome!
Dr. B.,
How are my chances at receiving an invitation to Dr. Davis’s lecture in May. My Nephew is a Marine who served in Iraq, and is now being deployed to Afghanistan under the Obama plan.