Drug and medical device companies should be banned from offering free food, gifts, travel and ghost-writing services to doctors, staff and students in all 129 of the nation’s medical colleges, an influential college association has concluded.
The proposed ban is the result of a two-year effort by the Association of American Medical Colleges to create a model policy governing interactions between the schools and industry. While schools can ignore the association’s advice, most follow its recommendations.
Rob Restuccia, executive director of the Prescription Project, a nonprofit group dedicated to eliminating conflicts of interest in medicine, said the association’s report would transform medical education.
“Most medical schools do not have strong conflict-of-interest policies, and this report will change that,” he said.
The new rules would apply only to medical schools, but they will have enormous influence across medicine, said Dr. David Rothman, president of the Institute on Medicine as a Profession at Columbia University.
Drug companies spend billions of dollars wooing doctors — more than they spend on research or consumer advertising. Medical schools, packed with prominent professors and impressionable trainees, are particularly attractive marketing targets.