Drug firms turn to private doctors for promotion
Filed under: Conflicts of interest, Hot Health Headline
Pharmaceutical companies are turning to doctors in private practice to promote their products as universities have developed conflict-of-interest policies that limit their doctors’ activities, according to the latest report from John Fauber of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Fauber, who has been covering conflicts of interest in medical research for more than a year, reports that “So much money is at stake that in January one academic doctor resigned his job at Harvard rather than give up his speaking income.”
Medical schools can restrict doctors who work for them from advocating particular drugs and can require that they inform patients of their ties to drug companies, but private physicians have no such obligations.
In previous articles, Fauber has reported on University of Wisconsin doctors who were making six-figure sums from drug and medical firms by serving as consultants or doing promotional speeches.
Critics say the talks can be biased and contribute to spiraling health care costs by promoting the use of expensive brand-name drugs over generics. The practice, according to critics, also leads to more non-approved and potentially harmful use of those drugs, so-called off-label prescribing.
Universities unite to present research to consumers
Thirty-five top universities, including many of North America’s leading research institutions, have banded together to create Futurity.org, a site designed to bypass the media and present their research directly to the public. According to Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed, each institution contributed $2,000 to help get the site started.
Paul Rogers of the San Jose Mercury News, reports that the site will function as a sort of social media wire service, intended to feed cleaned-up press releases to social media sites like Twitter and MySpace as well as news aggregators like Google News. Rogers found that the universities were turning to new media because of what they said was a decline in reliable science reporting.
Curtis Brainard of Columbia Journalism Review points to an important potential issue:
Labeling and transparency, however, are likely to become even greater issues for Futurity once it finalizes its syndication deals with Google News and Yahoo News. If that happens, its posts will be listed online next to similar items from traditional outlets like the Associated Press or The New York Times, making differentiation vitally important.
H1N1 fears put graduation tradition on hold
Oklahoma State University has joined a growing list of institutions where administrators will not be shaking graduates’ hands during commencement exercises this year.
A statement e-mailed to the university community today says “OSU has announced that as a health precaution, administrators will not shake hands during the degree presentations at commencement ceremonies Friday and Saturday.”
AHCJ resources for covering flu, pandemics and preparednessWichita State University has also decided to forgo the traditional hand shake.
“We don’t consider it a crisis. We just decided that it would probably be a prudent thing to do,” said WSU Provost Gary Miller.
The Associated Press reports a no-handshake policy for graduations at Oakland University north of Detroit and Mott Community College in Flint, Mich. The Chicago Tribune says graduates of the University of Michigan Ross School of Business and those at University of Illinois at Chicago also won’t be shaking hands. Other schools are considering such measures. Southern Illinois University Carbondale is putting its trust in hand sanitizers.
The CDC does not have a specific recommendation that universities suspend graduation handshakes; it offers the same precautions that we’ve been hearing: wash your hands and use alcohol-based hand sanitizers.
It seems officials have plenty of alternatives to suggest, including chest bumps, elbow taps and an “air high five.” Wichita State’s Miller suggested that administrators might pat graduates on the back instead.
Graduation could look a lot different this year.
Seven Texas schools seek tier-one status
Holly K. Hacker of The Dallas Morning News has a story about Texas universities seeking to be “tier-one” institutions. As Hacker explains, “tier-one” universities are “where researchers make the next big breakthroughs in science or engineering and where top scholars teach the next generation of leaders and problem-solvers.”
Tier-one universities help the economy, attract students and researchers from out of state and encourage students to stay in state for their education.
They also receive “hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants from groups like the National Institutes of Health.”
Hacker is having a live chat at 11:30 central time today (Monday).
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