Dec. 10, 2012 – As the debate continues regarding the pros and cons of industry/physician collaboration, a British-born surgeon has suggested in an article that the recent push to curtail and constrain this important interaction fails to recognize the benefits it can provide to the public health, according to a recent post in Policy and Medicine.
“This article supports the Coalition’s view that when industry and physicians work together, their relationships often lead to new treatments and procedures that improve care and the quality of life for U.S. patients,” said John Kamp, Executive Director of the Coalition for Healthcare Communication. “Certainly the system needs to have safeguards, but to continue to thwart these collaborations would do much more harm than good.”
Indeed, the majority of doctors act solely with their patients’ welfare in mind, Dr. Jonathan Mark Sackier states in Human Events. “Recent legislation and hyperbole decreeing that physicians should have no dialogue with life science companies, should not receive royalties for inventions or fees for running clinical trials or delivering speeches and such activities due to concerns of ‘conflict of interest’ are blatantly absurd – in what other branch of human enterprise is effort not rewarded?” Sackier wrote.
Throughout the article, Sackier asserts that major medical breakthroughs in the treatment of many conditions, including cancer and diabetes, were the result of “Clinicians spotting an unmet clinical need, scientists who collaborated to solve a problem, financiers who took a chance, companies who invested time, money and resources.”
He wonders “why, exactly” anyone wants “to throw all of this away,” just because “certain individuals think certain physicians might use undue influence to pervert medical therapies.” He concludes that “doctors need to be allowed to have free discourse with their industry colleagues, the free speech guaranteed to all in our Constitution.”
To read Sackier’s article in Human Events, go to: http://www.humanevents.com/2012/11/17/doctors-should-be-free-to-collaborate-in-medical-technology-development/
To read the Policy and Medicine post, go to: http://www.policymed.com/2012/12/surgeon-asks-not-throw-the-baby-of-innovation-out-with-the-bathwater-of-coi-regulations.html