Tue, 20 Nov 2007
Shills
Conventional medicine can be criticized for many reasons, but I think the biggest reason is that doctors have become shills for the drug companies. The doctor's job has become little more than to shove a marginally appropriate prescription slip into their trusting patients' hands. A review of Talking Back to Prozac in the New York Review of Books sums up the problem nicely.
Meanwhile, Healy wonders, who will now be sufficiently strong and uncorrupted to keep the drug makers honest? The FDA, he notes, is timid, underfunded, and infiltrated by friends of industry; even the most respected medical journals hesitate to offend their pharmaceutical advertisers; professional conferences are little more than trade fairs; leading professors accept huge sums in return for serving the companies in various venal ways; and, most disgracefully of all, many of their "research" papers are now ghostwritten outright by company-hired hacks. As Healy puts it, Big Pharma doesn't just bend the rules; it buys the rulebook.
