Glaxo Defunds CME’s While Funding Them Under The Table
On Monday, GlaxoSmithKline US announced that beginning next year it would no longer fund medical education companies to put on CME’s for doctors, a practice that has come under increasing scrutiny by Congress, the press and physicians because the pharma-sponsored CME’s are little more than advertisements for the company’s drugs and leave docs with little information about competing products. GSK makes Paxil, Wellbutrin and Lamictal, although they likely do no CME’s for any of the drugs since all three are now off-patent.
But Danny Carlat, a Tufts University psychiatrist who’s policed this issue harder than anyone else, has gotten GSK to admit that it’s carving a huge loophole into its new policy by claiming that 20 yet-to-be-named academic medical centers will run the GSK-funded CME’s but are then free to go out and hire a medical education company to do the work. Seriously, the company admitted to this old-wine-in-new-bottles practice.
Don’t GSK and others in Big Pharma get it? Academics (the serious ones), doctors (the ones who care) and the public (the ones who are paying attention) are sick and tired of your damn dog and pony show. You need to change your ways completely or people like Carlat and I will continue to work to expose your shoddy drug-touting science and biased information you spoon feed docs as the garbage it is. The choice is yours.
I cannot wait to see who the 20 medical centers are who are going to allow themselves to be used in such a fashion? How much does anyone want to bet that Harvard will be on the list?
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