Medical Students Across the Country Call on Schools to Eliminate Conflict of Interests

Nov. 16, 2010 - PRLog -- Thousands of medical students from across the country will celebrate National PharmFree Week, November 15-19, 2010, and call upon their schools to ban pharmaceutical marketing and conflicts of interest from their campuses. National PharmFree Week is sponsored by the American Medical Student Association (AMSA), the nation’s largest, independent medical student organization.

Students are also using National PharmFree Week as an opportunity to ask Congress to improve access to affordable medicines for patients. AMSA and other consumer and patient advocacy groups have called upon Congress to pass legislation that would ban deals where brand-name pharmaceutical companies pay generic companies to stay off the market. These “Pay for Delay” deals are estimated to delay generic entry of affected drugs by 17 months and cost American consumers $35 billion over the next ten years.

“AMSA wants to bring back the ‘evidence’ in evidence-based medicine,” says Chris Manz, AMSA PharmFree Campaign Chair and third year medical student at Duke University. “Our patients deserve the most effective care, which does not necessarily mean the newest or most expensive medicine. In order to confront the growing challenges facing our health care system, our current and future physicians must be able to tell the difference.”

Launched in 2002, AMSA’s PharmFree Campaign encourages medical schools and academic medical centers to develop policies that limit the access of pharmaceutical company representatives to their campuses and prohibit medical students and physicians from accepting gifts of any kind from these representatives.

In 2007, AMSA released its PharmFree Scorecard, a first-of-its-kind ranking which evaluates conflict-of-interest policies at medical colleges nationwide, with a focus on interaction between students or faculty and the pharmaceutical industry. The 2010 AMSA PharmFree Scorecard will be released next month. Check out http://www.amsascorecard.org/ for updates. This year, half of all U.S. medical schools have submitted a new or revised policy.

“AMSA has led the movement against conflicts of interest within medicine,” says John Brockman, AMSA national president. “Physicians should practice evidence-based medicine using the best existing clinical evidence—not carefully-packaged advertising—and continue to uphold personal and professional integrity.”

For more information on National PharmFree Week, please visit http://www.pharmfree.org/.

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Celebrating its 60th Anniversary, AMSA is the oldest and largest independent association of physicians-in-training in the United States. Founded in 1950, AMSA is a student-governed, non-profit organization committed to representing the concerns of physicians-in-training. To learn more about AMSA, our strategic priorities, or joining the organization, please visit us online at www.amsa.org/.