Medical Students, the Next Advertising Frontier

In class we have spoken about many different financialized markets, most of who have some aspect of unproductive labor driving up their profits.  The article, Harvard Medical School in Ethics Quandary in the New York Times explains this aspect within the pharmaceutical market.

The article exposes the intimate ties between the large pharmaceutical companies, like Merck and Pfizer, and medical schools, specifically Harvard.  The once prestigious school is now seen as one of the most corrupt because of its excessive acceptance of industry funds.  As more and more professors disclose their industry ties students are left feeling much like this first year student says:

“We are really being indoctrinated into a field of medicine that is becoming more and more commercialized.”

She is justified in her feelings.  It is unfortunate to think that when these students step into their  pharmaceuticals 101 class, they are in store for nothing more than a long infomercial.  Having paid consultants as professors is the epitome of unproductive labor for these corporations.  They are able to get their advertisers into some of the most influential positions available.  This generates both more profits not only from consumers but also by creating a new set of commissioned marketers for their drugs, the new doctors who are being convinced that these drugs are the best to proscribe for a given sets of symptoms.  It seems like a smart move on the part of the pharmaceuticals that also give millions of dollars to help fund research at the school. It begs the question that the article in a sense leaves hanging: are the ties all bad?  On one hand there is the bias representation of drugs to the impressionable minds of America’s future doctors.  As one student suggests:

“I felt really violated,” Mr. Zerden, now a fourth-year student, recently recalled. “Here we have 160 open minds trying to learn the basics in a protected space, and the information he was giving wasn’t as pure as I think it should be.”

Or perhaps there are some benefits to be gained (other than profits) by this marriage of pharmaceutical corporations and medical schools.  Thanks to all the funding the schools receive there is more opportunity for research grants and thus more stimulation for future innovation. Perhaps the opportunities out way the cost of intellectual honesty.  As one doctor explains,

“Without the support of the private sector, we would not have been able to develop what I call our ‘bone team’ in our lab”

The ‘bone team’ she mentions is sponsored by Merck to develop a follow-up drug to Fosamax, which just went generic.  So it seems that thanks to Merck the are the funds available for more doctors to do more research and develop more drugs that hopefully will be better than any of those already on the market.  The key here though is the hope.  There is no gaurantee that the researchers are doing nothing more than developing a replacement to the ‘gone generic’ drugs.  The findings might not find anything remarkable but the professor/consultants will talk up these new drugs, pushing the side effects out of the picture, and promoting it as better than any generic on the market and therefore keep the cycle of profit pumping back to the pharmaceuticals.

The cycle also reminds me of lobbying, another source of unproductive labor constantly under the ethical microscope.  But I think that a lesson can be learned from the corruption of lobbying, that with every restriction placed on the amount of money a politician can accept, a new loophole is found by a lobbyist.  I think that Harvard needs a lot more than a few regulations to fix this mess and full disclosure might not be the end all solution, although it is a modest start.