
What These Medical Journals Don’t Reveal: Top Doctors’ Ties to Industry - HillaryBriss
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/08/health/medical-journals-conflicts-of-interest.html
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doctorpangloss
It would be interesting to expand this reasoning to other STEM disciplines.

For example, would computer science researchers be more likely to express
cynicism of self driving cars if there weren't lucrative jobs in industry or
lucrative research contracts from car manufacturers (see
[https://www.csail.mit.edu/sponsors/strategic-
partners](https://www.csail.mit.edu/sponsors/strategic-partners) for an
example)?

I mean there must be dozens of self driving car efforts thousands of highly
compensated CS researchers. Millions of dollars in academic partnerships. Is
that not influential?

Would there be more cynicism about the safety narrative of these cars? Tenured
academic computer science and AI researchers are the __best positioned __in
society to comment on how realistic those claims are. But I 'd argue the money
has disincentivized them from saying so.

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danso
The FDA’s regulatory process for the approval and marketing of drugs is a
factor in how this disclosure system/mentality in pharmaceuticals came to be.
U.S. drug companies cannot advertise drugs for uses beyond what they’ve been
explicitly approved for. But doctors have the freedom to prescribe whatever
they want — e.g. fentanyl approved for cancer-related pain could theoretically
be prescribed by a doctor for migraines. The ostensible purpose of financial
disclosure is to mitigate the problem of doctors being incentivized to
prescribe inappropriate based on their ties to a pharma company.

Tech doesn’t operate under such strict regulation, e.g. Tesla’s Autopilot
isn’t forced to issue verbose disclaimers like the kind you hear for a TV drug
ad.

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dogma1138
While that’s correct prescribing drugs outside of their approved protocols can
open you to malpractice, the problem with painkillers is that as far as I know
there haven’t been any successful malpractice suits due to addiction in all
honesty the best way to stop to over prescription of opioids isn’t to take the
pharmaceuticals to court it’s to take the doctors.

A few cases that would set a precedence in pain management related addiction
and doctors would be much less likely to prescribe them as freely as they do
now.

I never understood this oddly American thing about “comfort” when undergoing
medical procedures form dental procedures to surgery it seems like while the
rest of the world is OK with some pain and discomfort in the US they’ll pump
you up with pain killers and anestetics until you don’t feel a thing.

I got two root canals done with only a mild local anesthetic it wasn’t
pleasant, but it wasn’t terrible and I see these videos of people coming out
of the densit in the US high on I don’t know what barely knowing where they
are and it’s simply mind boggling.

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
>I never understood this oddly American thing about “comfort” when undergoing
medical procedures form dental procedures to surgery it seems like while the
rest of the world is OK with some pain and discomfort in the US they’ll pump
you up with pain killers and anestetics until you don’t feel a thing.

It was this oddly American thing about “comfort” that resulted in the
invention of anesthesia for surgery in the United States. The reduction of
patient discomfort has been one of the big themes of American medicine since.

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Gatsky
I work in Oncology. A mobile battery service came over to replace a flat car
battery. I was chatting to the guy while he was changing it over, and he said
quite casually "Is it true what they say, that cancer has been cured and the
pharmaceutical companies are hiding it so they can make money?" [1].

Obviously this is a silly question, but scandals like this ongoing COI drama
probably do disproportionate damage to the public's perception of cancer care.
Varying degrees of this mistrust must be dealt with each time a patient sees
their oncologist. For that reason, Burris and the rest of them should be
punished, he certainly should not become the next president of ASCO.

[1] Never mind that I could have equally asked "Is it true what they say, that
infinitely rechargeable batteries have been invented, and the battery
companies are hiding it just to make money?".

