to your health:: APRIL 20, 2005

Reps, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll at the physicians’ expo

The wonderful thing about the pharmaceutical industry’s stranglehold over American medicine is that just when you think you have heard it all, you hear something even more extreme.

I thought I had finished work on the cover story for this week’s City Pulse when I discovered a news-in-brief item in the April 16 issue of the British Medical Journal.

It seems that the American College of Physicians (ACP), which represents all specialists in internal medicine, is having its annual convention in San Francisco. Their exhibit hall, the size of three football fields, is filled with booths and lavish displays showing off the wares of industry and offering physicians who stop by all sorts of freebies, food and so on.

But there’s no room in that big hall for a booth representing No Free Lunch, a non-profit group committed to activism to reduce physicians’ dependence on drug reps and industry largesse.

Each year the ACP allows in a few do-gooder organizations to set up booths. Bob Goodman, the internist who runs No Free Lunch, asked for space for a booth. The ACP turned him down.

On the No Free Lunch Web site, Goodman explains that when he called an ACP staffer to find out why, he was told that the ACP was worried that having a No Free Lunch booth would inhibit “dialogue” between visiting physicians and the reps manning the displays (http://www.nofreelunch.org/news.htm).

The staffer went on to accuse Goodman of helping an undercover media news team to slip into a previous ACP convention to film the goings-on. Goodman denied that he had anything to do with that infiltration, but he also added that the ACP’s own “ethics manual” offers physicians this advice about accepting gifts from drug reps: Would you want the general public to know what you are doing? The implication is that if you would not want your acceptance of a certain gift from a drug company to appear on the evening news, then maybe it’s not ethically a good idea to take that gift. So it’s somewhat ironic that the ACP would presumably object to media coverage of its exhibitor hall.

—Howard Brody