Medical Conflicts of Interest and the Glass Houses

Health Care Overhaul Must Start With Doctors, One Physician Notes

OPINION by Dr. NORTIN HADLER

Health care reform is focused on the quality of care, its accessibility and its cost. The debate is heated and likely to intensify in the months to come. It is also loud, so as to drown out debate on a focus for reform far more critical than impending fiscal bankruptcy.

Physicians' conflicts of interest could be huge determining factor in the success or failure of health care reform, one doctor notes.

(/AP Photo)

There is debate on the degree to which health care in the United States is ethically bankrupt, and what to do about it. The Institute of Medicine and nearly every other professional organization in the health arena has chimed in. Academic health centers and unaffiliated hospitals are racing to write or expand policy statements on conflicts of interest in regard to clinical activities.Much of the gnashing of teeth relates to conflictual arrangements between individual practitioners and drug or device manufacturers. Policy is targeting the marketing that seems on the surface to be innocuous: the on-site "detailing" by drug and device representatives, the trinkets and "free meals," the samples that cause one to become more familiar with prescribing the product than with the product's limitations, the sponsored educational programs that engender comfort with the sales personnel if not the product, etc. Read more...