Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16835

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Electronic Source

Silverman E
100 Researchers Ask NIH To Fund Ethics Research
Pharmalot 2009 Nov 17
http://www.pharmalot.com/2009/11/100-researchers-ask-nih-to-fund-ethics-research/

Notes:

link to letter – http://www.pharmedout.org/NIHLetter.pdf

Full text:

Dozens of researchers, clinicians, and ethicists sent a letter asking the NIH to fund research on medical ethics, conflicts of interest, and industry influence on prescribing behavior. Why? They note that stimulus funding has increased the NIH budget significantly, but the agency has “no mechanism for funding research on how commercial interests affect the choice of medical therapeutics.”
In their Nov. 17 letter, they write NIH director Francis Collins that the “NIH funds a substantial portion of the generation and dissemination of evidence, but the uptake of that evidence and its translation into clinical practice is strongly affected by the complex web of relationships that exists among industry, academicians, medical educators and clinicians…
“..we ask that you acknowledge the research gap on the effect of conflicts of interest and commercial influence on medical decisionmaking and set in motion a process that leads to recognition of the importance of funding studies on research ethics, the beliefs and behaviors of researchers and clinicians, and the effects of industry-academic relationships on the generation and dissemination of medical knowledge.”
The letter was distributed by PharmedOut and the writers include Virginia Barbour, chief editor of PLoS Medicine; Jerome Kassirer, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine; Jerry Avorn the Harvard physician who invented academic detailing; Kay Dickersin, director of the US Cochrane Center, and Susan Wood, former head of the FDA Office of Women’s Health Research, who resigned over political influence regarding FDA decisions on the emergency contraceptive Plan B.
Institutional signers include the Public Library of Science, the American Medical Student Association, the National Physicians Alliance, Consumers Union, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and the National Women’s Health Network.