This week New England Cable Network aired an interesting debate: Should Gifts Be Banned? Thomas Stossel, MD, Chief of Translational Medicine at Harvard was interviewed with Daniel Carlat, MD, community psychiatrist and critic of all ties to industry.
The opening of the program states:
The Senate has passed a ban on pharmaceutical company gifts to physicians. It applies to everything from free pens and notepads to free lunches and tickets. It argues that we all pay higher drug prices and perhaps take unnecessary drugs, because of the influence that gifts have on doctors.
But this is not a ban on just gifts, in the current definition of gifts it includes everything from support of continuing medical education to doctors, to investigator initiated research.
Several key points in the program included:
The effects of S2660 on Conventions in Boston (in the current definition any contributions for the educational event by industry including exhibit fees could be considered a gift to participants and thereby banned which would cost the state Billions in convention business).
The department of health will have to approve all payments to physicians for science and research. This will tie up valuable resources in small research companies in justifying expenses to the state.
This is so “draconian” that it would ban Spanish language diabetes literature to be given out at community centers in Massachusetts.
A real question around this is: do these small “gifts” truly corrupt doctors.
In answer to this both panelists agreed:
“Medicine is so much better today than it was forty fifty years ago, if doctors were corrupted by gifts, these gains would be impossible.”
Enjoy the show: Should Gifts Be Banned?