Harvard gets and "F"

Harvard Medical School in Ethics Quandary

Excerpt:

In a first-year pharmacology class at Harvard Medical School, Matt Zerden grew wary as the professor promoted the benefits of cholesterol drugs and seemed to belittle a student who asked about side effects.

Mr. Zerden later discovered something by searching online that he began sharing with his classmates. The professor was not only a full-time member of the Harvard Medical faculty, but a paid consultant to 10 drug companies, including five makers of cholesterol treatments.

“I felt really violated,” Mr. Zerden, now a fourth-year student, recently recalled. “Here we have 160 open minds trying to learn the basics in a protected space, and the information he was giving wasn’t as pure as I think it should be.”

Mr. Zerden’s minor stir four years ago has lately grown into a full-blown movement by more than 200 Harvard Medical School students and sympathetic faculty, intent on exposing and curtailing the industry influence in their classrooms and laboratories, as well as in Harvard’s 17 affiliated teaching hospitals and institutes.

They say they are concerned that the same money that helped build the school’s world-class status may in fact be hurting its reputation and affecting its teaching.

Comment: Full disclosure is the key. Anymore on the financial programs on TV, the analyst will disclose whether they have stock in the same company whose stock they are promoting. Park Nicollet (health care clinics in Minnesota) recently instituted a policy requiring clinic doctors to disclose their financial relationships with drug and medical device companies: Park Nicollet doctors will disclose ties to vendors

Excerpt:

Park Nicollet Health Services has become the first health care system in Minnesota, and one of an elite group nationally, to require doctors to publicly disclose their financial relationships with drug and medical device companies.

This week's move by Park Nicollet is designed to allay concerns that these relationships -- often forged with thousands of dollars in free meals and travel, speakers' fees, royalties for inventions and professional consultation payments -- pose a conflict of interest by influencing doctors' treatment decisions. Drug and device companies defend the payments, saying doctors' expertise is needed to make their products better.

Typically, the relationships are invisible to patients, but now those treated at Park Nicollet can begin viewing the details at tinyurl.com/cy5frs.