As AMSA members, we believe in providing the highest quality care to our patients through evidence-based medicine. No where in our work is this more evident than in our Pharm Free campaign.

The current relationship between the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry - characterized by untoward influence and bad science - is as unsustainable as our current health care system. Physicians have come to depend on pharmaceutical companies to fund Continuing Medical Education (CME) and our entire infrastructure of academic medicine, down to the lunches in which medical students and residents are educated. The result is influenced prescribing habits that are contrary to the best available medical evidence. Indeed, the "best" medical evidence is often tainted by a conflict of interests: it is funded and selectively reported by those who stand to profit from that 'research'. This is unsustainable for at least two reasons. For one, our patients' trust in us is threatened because our clinical decisions appear to be influenced by cheerleaders distributing pens and dinners. Additionally, a cost shift to our patients occurs when companies spend money to influence our prescribing behavior-resulting in unaffordable medications.

Educating students, physicians and the public about the professional, ethical and practical consequences of the current medicine-industry relationship is the principal goal of AMSA's Pharm Free campaign. We are working towards developing educational tools that highlight how pharmaceutical companies undertake their marketing campaigns. In addition, we encourage medical schools, residency programs and academic medical centers to create "pharm free" policies that define and limit the relationship between students/residents and drug reps. There should be no role for the biased information distributed by drug reps at centers where medical knowledge is both created and disseminated. AMSA is working to provide members with the tools to bring about these changes at your schools, residency programs, and hospitals.

For the sake of our patients and our credibility we must learn to define the relationship between our profession and the pharmaceutical industry on our terms. We must acknowledge that this industry has a valuable role in healthcare, but one that it is currently failing to play. As the gatekeepers to their vast profits, as partners in our patient's health, and as members of a proud and ancient profession, we have both the ability and the responsibility to take action and to ensure medicine is practiced with the highest scientific and ethical standards.

AMSA PHARMACEUTICAL POLICY

Promoting access to safe, effective, and affordable pharmaceuticals

Pharmaceuticals have changed medicine, for better and for worse. From the discovery of aspirin and penicillin, to the modern age of targeted therapeutics, medicines have changed the ways that health care is practiced and disease is perceived. We have pharmaceuticals to thank for much of the increase in our life expectancy. But the health security of our people and the professional practice of medicine is threatened by a stagnant and profit-driven system. The boom of the pharmaceutical industry has introduced its share of uncertain practices: marketing strategies designed to sway the prescribing habits of physicians, drug testing practices that avoid head-to-head comparisons of similar drugs, an FDA whose very funding for enforcement depends on money from the companies they are trusted to investigate. The result? Americans pay more than 60% greater for pharmaceuticals than citizens of other countries. Market forces threaten the lives of millions of people living with HIV, TB, and other curable conditions by denying them the right to access essential medicines. Evidence-based prescribing occurs only half of the time, and pressure from consumers and industry is pushing me-too drugs towards sale before sufficient data has been collected or published.

The pharmaceutical policy mission of AMSA is to promote access to safe, effective, and affordable therapeutics at home and around the world. We challenge the pharmaceutical industry's influence on the health care system, demand access to essential medicines everywhere, and push for evidence-based medicines and prescribing practices.

What do Medical Students think about this? Read AMSA's policy on Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices

RESOURCES

Comprehensive resource for understanding the pharmaceutical industry, its structure and relationship with the medical profession, relevant health policy perspectives, and courses for medical student and physician action...

• Understanding the Industry: Why are drug prices so high?
  
  
• Do Your Homework: Tools for Transparency
  
  
• Tell the Fed’s What’s Up
  
  
• Annotated Bibliography
  
  
• Marketing vs. Research & Development
  
  
• Reimportation as a short-term solution
  
  
• The FDA
  
  
• Taking on Drug Companies?
  
  
• How much is too much?
  
  
• Conflict of Interest in Clinical Research

PHARMACEUTICAL NEWS FLASH

Pharmaceutical Companies Threaten Medical Schools and Their Faculty

If you're interested in the issue of pharmaceutical sanity, check out these amazing detective stories done by NPR about how Merck tried to pressure medical school deans to silence physicians who spoke out about the cardiovascular events of Vioxx. You can read or listen:

• Part 1: Documents Suggest Merck Tried to Censor Vioxx Critics (6/9/05)
• Part 2: Did Merck Try to Censor Vioxx Critics? (6/9/05)
• Medical Schools and Drug Firm Dollars (6/9/05)
• More on Merck's Attempts to Quash Criticism (6/10/05)
  The story is very well done and includes readings of memos by drug companies complaining about medical school faculty "emphasizing the risks" of Vioxx and then entails their plot to get even and how academic medical centers are standing up and fighting back.