Doctors learn from other M. D. s

Change in medicine is relentless. New drugs and devices, new indications for old ones and newly recognized safety issues are hard for busy M. D. s to keep up with.

One way to manage all this innovation has been for medical product companies to pay physicians to speak to their colleagues about products, usually at evening events in restaurants.

This is one of many industry- sponsored educational activities attacked by critics who want strict apartheid between M. D. s and medical products companies. They denigrate such speaking as companyscripted marketing, not “education,” and insinuate that the meals are so “lavish” they amount to bribery.

They confidently charge — without evidence — that such promotion causes physicians to inappropriately prescribe new products that are no better, but more expensive and less safe, than generic alternatives.

As exemplified by USA TODAY’s “our view,” the news media, largely unaware of the difficulties of assimilating medical innovation, echo these shallow ideas. I’m used to that. But when Glaxo, a major phar- maceutical company, buys into them, the sun is setting. Corporate- funded updates about new drugs are valuable, and no other type of medical education is so rigorously regulated. Companies can only convey information approved by the Food and Drug Administration, information that can save lives. Doctors learn from other doctors, and good medical educators should be paid.

Why is learning in a restaurant inferior to learning in a monastery? Small gatherings allow attendees to discuss cases with the expert speaker.

Critics call the doctors’ speeches “toxic marketing,” but it’s largely because of increased use of those marketed products over the past half- century that longevity increased by more than a decade, mortality from major diseases fell precipitously and life quality improved.

Patients want better, safer drugs. Those drugs come from strong research and education relationships between the medical profession and industry. Glaxo’s leadership, in parroting the critics’ rhetoric, has sacrificed patients’ interests to a cheap, shortsighted public relations exercise.