Understanding Physician-Pharmaceutical Industry Interactions

Book excerpt: Physician-pharmaceutical industry interactions continue to generate heated debate in academic and public domains, both in the United States and abroad. Despite this, recent research suggests that physicians and physicians-in-training remain uninformed of the core issues and are ill-prepared to understand pharmaceutical industry promotion. Furthermore, few medical curricula address this issue, despite warnings of the imperative need to address this gap in the education of tomorrow's physicians. There is a vast medical literature on this topic, but no single, concise resource. This book aims to fill that gap by providing a resource that explains the essential elements of this subject. The text makes the reader more aware of the key ethical issues and allows the reader to be a more savvy interpreter of industry promotion, have a heightened awareness of the public and medical legal consequences of some physician-pharmaceutical industry interactions, and be better equipped to handle real-life encounters with industry.