Featured Post

Is the new professionalism and ACP's new ethics really just about following guidelines?

The Charter ( Medical Professionalism in the New Millennium.A Physician's Charter) did not deal with just the important relationship of ...

Friday, August 15, 2008

Physicians who are confused and mislead by drug companies can rest easy-maybe, the government is coming to help

Enticed by pizza and promotional pens and mugs, enchanted by attractive, tricky drug reps and hoodwinked by cleverly crafted medical articles that have been funded by Big Pharma the woefully undereducated and incredibly gullible and naive medical doctors may look forward to having help from the government . At least that is being proposed, see here for news about that.

The plan is for the government to hire unbiased docs who will go forth and detail the office docs but this time the detailing will be done by folks who know the truth. It has become very difficult for someone with only a college degree, four years of med school and from 3-8 years of further education to sort the truth from the hype in regard to medication use. Fortunately, once the government hires someone with similar educational background to disseminate the unbiased truth they apparently- through the magic of government funding- become able to pluck the nuggets of truth from the dung of pharma manufactured propaganda and the razzle-dazzle of the traveling hired guns.

There are some cynics who believe that government decisions themselves have an unfortunate but predictable tendency to be biased, confused and self interested but the high-school civics class notion of the governmental agency or agent who is free of self interest and serves only the public good has considerable currency in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

As suggested by "The Last Psychiatrist" blog -does it not worry anyone that Congress believes or claims that physicians are so clueless that the government has to send out "academic detailers" to instruct the docs as to proper patient care?

I also wonder how have they been able to practice medicine before without that help?

Were not the "academic detailers" hired by the medical education companies hired by the drug companies thought to be part of the problem? Well, with a different source of funding things will change.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am a pre-med student, applying for medical school this year. I ran across your blog and found it great! Very informative and I will be keeping up. While I'm still practically in the elementary process of becoming a doctor, I am trying to educate and expose myself to every aspect of the medical world I can aside from academics. Well, I will be keeping up with your blog. If there is a way for me to subscribe to it, please let me know how!!

james gaulte said...

Tiffany,

Thanks for the kind words.If you go to an aggregator such as www.bloglines.com, you can sign up for my feeds as well some my favorite blogs such as DB's Medical Rants,Dr. Wes and Notes from Dr RW and Kevin,MD.

JG

Anonymous said...

Hey Dr. Gaulte,

I followed some links to your site, and found this post interesting. I'm in the process of reviewing your other insights. In the meantime, you might (or maybe not) enjoy these 2 recent posts of mine about the same topic.

Chip Williams
why you doctor thinks
how do you like this