Understanding Physician-Pharmaceutical Industry Interactions
A Concise Guide

This concise guide will help health professionals understand their relationship with the pharmaceutical industry.

Shaili Jain (Author)

9780521868648, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 April 2007

160 pages
23.5 x 16 x 1.6 cm, 0.336 kg

This is an excellent introduction to an area that deserves considerable thought by healthcare providers of all stripes. The book is especially relevant for practitioners because it confronts ethical dilemmas as physicians would experience them in the real world of medical practice -- an approach that renders the subject more complicated and more interesting, and the book more useful. The author does not gloss over the complexities of the subject, but rather captures them succinctly, distills them, and leaves ultimate judgments to the readers. Doody's Book Review

Physician-pharmaceutical industry interactions continue to generate heated debate in academic and public domains, both in the United States and abroad. Despite this, recent research suggests that physicians and physicians-in-training remain uninformed of the core issues and are ill-prepared to understand pharmaceutical industry promotion. Furthermore, few medical curricula address this issue, despite warnings of the imperative need to address this gap in the education of tomorrow's physicians. There is a vast medical literature on this topic, but no single, concise resource. This book aims to fill that gap by providing a resource that explains the essential elements of this subject. The text makes the reader more aware of the key ethical issues and allows the reader to be a more savvy interpreter of industry promotion, have a heightened awareness of the public and medical legal consequences of some physician-pharmaceutical industry interactions, and be better equipped to handle real-life encounters with industry.

1. Gifts from the pharmaceutical industry to physicians: do they influence prescribing?
2. Ethical considerations of receiving gifts from the pharmaceutical industry
3. One on one: an analysis of the physician-pharmaceutical company representative detailing interaction
4. Medical academia and the pharmaceutical industry
5. Teaching physicians-in-training about pharmaceutical industry promotion
6. Continuing medical education: how to separate continuing medical education from pharmaceutical industry promotion
7. Professional policies on physician-pharmaceutical industry interactions
8. Preserving professionalism: patients' perceptions of physicians' acceptance of gifts from the pharmaceutical industry
9. To sample or not to sample? The use of pharmaceutical industry-supplied medications in medical practice
10. Physician-pharmaceutical industry interactions, the law, and the media
11. Direct to consumer advertising
12. Pharmaceutical industry interactions with health care professionals: a global perspective
13. Internet resources for teaching about PPII and independent sources of information about prescription medicines.

Subject Areas: Forensic medicine [MMQ], Medical ethics & professional conduct [MBDC], Medicine: general issues [MB], Medical & healthcare law [LNTM]