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This year, as APA's annual meeting approaches, my mailbox again quickly fills each day with the many striking, colorful, glossy brochures announcing pharmaceutical company-sponsored symposia. Each symposium is "supported by an unrestricted educational grant from" the drug company involved. Yet the Physicians' Desk Reference confirms that the drugs to be discussed in each symposium are the same drugs the sponsoring company manufactures. The use here of the adjective "unrestricted" is at best naive, at worst dishonest. What is really unseemly, though, is the very existence of this type of symposium in the first place.
Under the heading "Conflict of Interest," one of the brochures lists the companies for which the speakers have worked as consultants. Yet the very act of presenting favorable reports about a product made by the company paying the speakers' expenses represents a conflict of interest, subtly or not so subtly impairing the speakers' objectivity, while promoting a product under the guise of that objectivity.
I also received an invitation for cocktails and hors d'oeurves by a company whose name and product name were printed boldly on the card. This, at least, is honest advertising, no oxymoron intended.
If APA accepts money from the pharmaceutical industry, the companies should be publicly thanked, of course. Then all the money should be put in a pot and used for research that might not otherwise be funded, such as the study of the role of unemployment in suicide, sponsorship of speakers selected by the membership, or some other good cause.
Companies should be allowed absolutely no oversight about how unrestricted grant money is spent, and the only grant money accepted should be unrestricted. Furthermore, companies should pay handsomely for the right to set up advertising tables at our convention and, as a further requirement, agree not to advertise their drugs directly to the public. They would do these things if we insisted because they would have to compete with one another for access to us, their customers. And when we have done these decent things, we can proudly celebrate by buying our own cocktails and hors d'oeurves.
Peter J. Manos, M.D., Ph.D.
Seattle, Wash.
I recently received from a pharmaceutical company a 2-cubic-foot box containing helium-filled balloons advertising two psychotropic medications-a cute symbol, I suppose, which was also used at the manufacturer's booth at APA's annual meeting last month in Toronto.
This is only the most recent representation of a cavalier advertising extravagance that mocks the often prohibitive cost to our patients of health-sustaining drugs. It also mocks the concern that some of us physicians have for the runaway commercialization of Medicare.
Lindley M. Winston, M.D.
Malvern, Pa.