Pharmaphobia: How the Conflict of Interest Myth Undermines American Medical Innovation

Long a champion of physician and industry collaboration, Thomas Stossel, M.D., has published a new book entitled Pharmaphobia: How the Conflict of Interest Myth Undermines American Medical Innovation. In it, Stossel, a distinguished Harvard hematologist and researcher, decries the conflict of interest movement as detrimental to medical progress and ultimately the patients who would benefit from new, innovative therapies. Writing about conflicts of interest has been an increasingly surefire way to get published—the Journal of the American Medical Association even has its own conflict of interest category. What’s often missing from both sides of the mostly academic “COI” debate, however, is a relation back of nebulous concepts to what is important: tangible medical innovations and patient well-being. One of the reasons Dr. Stossel’s writing is so engaging is that he bucks this trend by illustrating in plain language what is at stake. “Physician-industry interactions have been critical to the development of a large percentage of the medical products that allow physicians to prevent heart attacks, cure cancers, and restore mobility to the elderly,” he writes. Over the course of my career, medicine and industry have together made spectacular progress against diseases. Cardiovascular deaths are down 60 percent, HIV has been converted from a death sentence to a chronic disease, and cancer mortality is at a historic low. Despite such progress and the r...
Source: Policy and Medicine - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs