Welcome to PostScript!
PostScript, a blog from the Prescription Project, adds another dimension to the Project’s goal of raising awareness around the medical conflict-of-interest issues that are created when drug companies open their wallets to influence prescribing. The Prescription Project Weekly Reader, an e-newsletter that highlights relevant news stories of the week, will continue its regular circulation. You can sign up to receive the Weekly Reader at the Prescription Project website, www.prescriptionproject.org, where you can also find project news, press releases and media resources, and information on upcoming events.
If you’ve visited our website before or received the Weekly Reader, you know that RxP has a clear mission—to eliminate the influence of pharmaceutical money on the practice of medicine. Toward that end, PostScript will have a clear voice, too, commenting on recent news related to the project and contributing to the growing conversation in the media and blogosphere about pharmaceutical marketing and its harmful effects on health care in this country.
But PostScript cannot just be a single voice. Medical conflict of interest issues affect so many different people in as many ways. Therefore, we feel this blog should reflect those varied voices, acting from time to time as a forum for friends and colleagues of the project—patients and health care practitioners, workers and administrators who have seen first-hand the effects of pharmaceutical marketing on their work and treatment—to share their views.
The blogosphere is deep and wide, and there are a few good blogs that thoroughly track the pharmaceutical and health care industries on a daily basis. We will not join them in daily posts, but hope you’ll visit some of the sites listed on our blogroll to the right—they are valuable voices in the conversation. And of course, we hope you will subscribe to PostScript via the RSS feed to the right, which will send an email each time there’s a new post. Or bookmark the site.
Either way, be sure to check back soon.
September 25th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
I work for a large health region in BC (12 acute care hospitals). For years, drug reps would give money to certain clinicians or departments to do “preceptorships” (e.g. a rep would spend the day with a surgeon in the OR to watch how a marketed drug is used and money would be exchanged).
Patient consent was likely not acquired when the rep entered a clinic or an OR.
Recently, our head administrators in conjunction with our medical ethicist reviewed this practice and made an official statement that this practice was unacceptable and should not be entertained from now on. Letters were also sent to the heads of Big Pharma.
In Pharmacy we have discouraged this for years so it was finally nice to see the entire organization fall in line with our beliefs that we feel are in the best interests of the patient.
Hopefully other large healthcare organizations will have the will to do what our administrators have done.
September 27th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
As a medical student being “educated” in the current, industry-friendly environment that is medical education, I am excited that the Prescription Project is here to help medicine reclaim its ethics and its duty to patients and the healthcare system by removing conflicts of interest from the wards, clinics, and lecture halls.
Medicine is truly sick with the disease called “dual loyalties” and its sequelae (e.g. cognitive dissonance, blatant denial, sense of entitlement), and I am hopeful that PP can write the script that begins to cure this malady, for the good of the profession, the patients, and the U.S. healthcare system.
December 10th, 2007 at 11:06 am
Welcome to the Pharma Blogopshere. How about adding Pharma Marketing Blog (http://pharmamkting.blogspot.com/) to your blogroll — we seem to share certain viewpoints.
Also, I have added your blog to the Pharma Blogosphere line up: see http://pharmablogosphere.blogspot.com/2007/12/postscript-newly-discovered-pharma-blog.html
Thanks,
John Mack