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.
There is a problem with going to far in the other direction. You have schools which have teachers who have never done a days work in industry and teach that which is useless to industry. It must be remembered that in the end it is the drug company which makes the pills which saves lives.
Physicians no longer get drug company pens. (They are becoming a commodity on eBay.) But medicine is a business. Some drugs are equal to others in efficacy but cheaper to the patient. Some drugs work better than another. Pharmaceutical companies do need to get these messages out. They do help with dissemination of information.
For example, I can’t follow which drugs are tier one and tier two in various plans. It changes monthly if not weekly. I think this is a game the insurance companies play. Crestor is now tier one and Zocor is tier two. Next week, it will be the reverse or some third drug will be in the milieu. I think the insurance companies do this intentionally, so patients end up paying more for equivalent meds. “Drug pushers” as we affectionately know pharmaceutical reps help me to save patients money but helping me keep abreast of this game.
Of course, there are lazy physicians and they simply reach for whatever is in the sample closet. I see lots of patients that are on the latest and most expensive anti-hypertensive. Hydrochlorothiazide (HCTZ) is a very old blood pressure medicine and should be first line on pretty much everyone. It costs pennies. I am conflicted by drug samples. We never have samples for the drugs that are generics. Samples can help or hurt patients’ pocket books. Adverse drug reactions or drug intolerances definitely do occur. If one gives patients a sample, then they can make sure the new medicine agrees with them before filling an expensive prescription.
I echo robroy’s comments.