When drug companies take over the education of doctors is it any wonder that doctors prescribe drugs without knowing the side-effects? When GlaxoSmithKline writes the course then it promotes its own diabetes drug Avandia (which has been found to cause heart disease) and hardly mentions a safer drug from a competitor.
In an article in the New York Times, a professor at Tufts Medical School exposes "Education that doubles as advertising for drug companies": Diagnosis: Conflict of Interest. It's an eye-opening read.
2 comments:
I've been studying this growing trend, and, having recently seen "Side Effects" (http://www.sideeffectsthemovie.com/) it dawned on me that people are being prescribed drugs by marketing executives and former cheerleaders.
Doctors write prescriptions (based on inaccurate information from former cheerleaders now working as drug reps) for people who come to their office specifically for that drug (based on misleading advertising campaigns).
So why do we even have doctors any more?
That's a good point. Who really is doing the prescribing?
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