Debate rages over drug company gifts

An influential association has concluded that drug and medical device companies should be banned from offering free food, gifts, travel and ghost-writing services to doctors, staff members and students in all 129 of the nation’s medical colleges.

The proposed ban is the result of a two-year effort by the Association of American Medical Colleges to create a model policy governing interactions between medical schools and industry, according to The New York Times.

While schools can ignore the association’s advice, most follow its recommendations.

Drug companies spend billions of dollars annually wooing doctors – more than they spend on research or consumer advertising. Medical schools, packed with prominent professors and doctors-in-training, are particularly attractive marketing targets, the Times reported.

Companies have for decades provided faculty and students with free food and gifts, offered lucrative consulting arrangements to top-notch teachers and even ghost-written research papers for busy professors. (For a story about the legal and ethical concerns associated with ghost-writing, see page 3.)

A group of influential doctors decried these practices in a 2006 article in The Journal of the American Medical Association, and said that medical schools should ban them. In the article’s wake, the medical college association created a task force.

Speakers’ bureaus and drug samples are pillars of the industry’s marketing operations, and many medical school professors have resisted efforts to restrict them. Only a handful of medical schools presently bar faculty members from serving on speakers’ bureaus, according to the Times.