Lou Lasagna and the MIC “Integrated Career Ladder” – More Than Just A “Revolving Door.”

BY MIKE MAGEE The New York Times recently shinned a light on the FDA’s top science regulator of the tobacco industry, Matt Holman, who announced his retirement after 20 years to join Phillip Morris. As they noted, “To critics, Dr. Holman’s move is a particularly concerning example of the ‘revolving door’ between federal officials and the industries they regulate…” As a Medical Historian, I’ve never been a fan of the casual “revolving door” metaphor because it doesn’t quite capture the highly structured and deliberate attempts of a variety of academic medical scientists over a number of decades in the 2nd half of the 20th century to establish and reward an “integrated career ladder” that connected academic medicine, industry and the government.  In CODE BLUE: The Birth of the Medical-Industrial Complex, I recount the vertical integration strategies of deception that were Arthur Sackler. But the academic role model for the “young physicians” of his day was not Sackler, but rather the physician and pharmacologist Louis Lasagna who had trained at Johns Hopkins. As a contrarian, he was an equal-opportunity offender, often sought after for media commentary. He had challenged the pharmaceutical industry’s over-the-top marketing claims, outrageous prices, and deceptive relationships with doctors nationwide, but also was not shy about criticizing his fellow physicians’ dismal state of expertise in all things pharmacologic. I...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs