Catching up on Conflict of Interest news. Please make it stop.

A little end-of-the-year clean up of desk clutter never hurts. Well, yes it does when you see the accumulation of health care confilct of interest stories that have piled up recently. I had started this cleanup at the end of 2012 but am just now getting around to publishing it.

Doctors with links to drug companies influence treatment guidelines - Another in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s long-running series on conflicts of interest in health care.

Weill Cornell Dean Remains on Corporate Payrolls, Sparking Debate About Industry’s Role in Academia. (Excerpts: “In addition to receiving an academic salary from Cornell, WCMC Dean Laurie Glimcher receives six-figure salaries annually from pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb and the Waters Corporation, a laboratory equipment company, according to the companies’ filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. …“If medical faculty know they’re basically reporting to Bristol Myers Squibb, does that make them change what they do? Be more afraid to criticize certain priorities?” said Roy Poses, president of the non-profit Foundation for Integrity and Responsibility. “There’s a lot of evidence to [cause] concern [that it does] alter their behavior.”)
AARP lobbies against Medicare changes that could hurt its bottom line
(Excerpt: “There is a potential conflict of interest,” said Marilyn Moon, a former senior AARP official who runs the health-care program at the nonprofit American Institutes for Research. “Any way you look at changes in Medigap that people are talking about, I think it’s good for beneficiaries, and anybody who is opposing that who claims they are looking out for beneficiaries, you have to wonder why.”)
Obamacare architect leaves White House for pharmaceutical industry job: Few people embody the corporatist revolving door greasing Washington as purely as Elizabeth Fowler

(Excerpt: “This is precisely the behavior which, quite rationally, makes the citizenry so jaded about Washington. It’s what ensures that the interests of the same permanent power factions are served regardless of election outcomes. It’s what makes a complete mockery out of claims of democracy. And it’s what demonstrates that corporatism and oligarchy are the dominant forms of government in the US.”)

How Drug Company Money Is Undermining Science

A Clinical Trial and Suicide Leave Many Questions: Part 3: Conflict of Interest – Part 3 of a searing series by Dr. Judy Stone on the well-known (although perhaps not known enough) suicide of a young man enrolled in a psychiatric drug trial at the University of Minnesota.

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