Some professors at the Harvard Medical School are the biggest beneficiaries of funding and gifts from the drug industry.
These conflicts of interest are causing some dissension within the student body, with some feeling “violated” when being lectured by professors who are paid consultants to drug makers.
This places the school in a difficult position. On one hand, especially at a school as revered as Harvard, the industry pays hundreds of millions of dollars to the faculty. On the other, is that money influencing what they teach to students?
That question is dividing both medical students and professors, with organizations being formed that support both sides of the argument.
It will be interesting to see how the situation resolves itself. Is Harvard willing to turn down drug money in an effort to “purify” its teaching? And, if not, how can anyone expect other hospitals and medical schools to do so?
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{ 5 comments }
I don’t know. Apparently pens, sticky notes and an occasional piece of pizza is all that it takes to corrupt us out in the community. But in the rarified atmosphere of Harvard maybe large sums of money have no similar effect.
I love that the student felt ‘violated’. Get over it! Harvard (at least undergrad) is so full of liberal types that I’m not surprised they would feel ‘violated’ that a professor actually gets money from a drug company. But keep in mind, if you BELIEVE IN A PRODUCT (especially statins, which ARE beneficial products) then you might (1) accept money from them to give your opinion to others (2) tell a medical student that they are indeed good products. There is nothing dishonest about this. (Although there probably was no reason to belittle the student).
But in today’s super-liberal environment, it is not bad acts but the “appearance of impropriety” that takes precedence. People have no problem if a non-scientist/non-expert (like an actor) endorses a hair product – but ask a well-respected expert to endorse a product that they understand, and people feel ‘violated’.
So, they don’t want to be educated by world-class experts in pharmacy?
OK…give them a copy of Lippencott and tell them they’re on their own.
They can’t have it both ways.
I’m a Harvard medical student, and let me say this definitively, having gone through the first two years of curriculum: WE HARDLY LEARN PHARMACOLOGY. There is a two week course on Pharmacology where many, many drugs are discussed without much emphasis placed on one or the other, more on general concepts. During our pathophysiology courses, drug treatments are rarely if ever discussed despite protests of the students to be taught more. That’s an issue of the curriculum, but from a conflict of interest standpoint, there’s simply no opportunity to be “influenced” by the industry. Drug influence in Harvard Medical School research by faculty is an entirely different issue. In the curriculum, clamoring about drug industry influence is a joke.
I love it how the innocent little snowflakes at Harvard are not bright enough to discern the data for themselves and they want to blame influence on the drug company. If anyone in medicine allows to be influenced by anything other than data they should go into politics. But the ivory tower teaching institutions have taught the impressionable minds that all data is bad unless its data on a 4 dollar generic drug. So go prescribe and use Digitalis because its cheap.
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