Are you beginning to wonder whether the pharmaceutical industry might have too much influence over medical decision-making? If so, you’re hardly alone. Prominent news sources have started sounding the alarm about the disturbing ties between drug makers and medical education, suggesting that Big Pharma is already buying up the doctors of tomorrow. The New York Times: “Harvard Medical School in Ethics Quandary”; NPR: “Med Schools Pressed to Cut Drug Firm Ties”; but Time Magazine states it best: “Is Drug-Company Money Tainting Medical Education?”
Before you get excited enough to renew your long-dormant Time subscription, I must confess that, like the principal investigator in an mRNA vaccine trial, I may have employed some sleight of hand: The magazine’s story, as the others noted above, is from 2009.
Old news? Not quite. A closer look at those old stories reveals the even greater corruption of medical education today. What drove such big-name coverage of this important issue 14 years ago? All the stories above, and many more besides, were prompted by the American Medical Student Association’s PharmFree Scorecard.
AMSA, the largest and oldest medical student association in the nation with tens of thousands of members and influential past presidents like Dr. Leana Wen, established its PharmFree initiative in 2002. By 2004, the PharmFree campaign was leading a march on Pfizer headquarters in order to “speak out against the pharmaceutical industry’s biased marketing practices” and “persuade the medical community to be more professionally responsible to patients rather than profits.”
Yet PharmFree didn’t
