WILTIMS #111: Conflict of disinterest

Last night, or in the wee hours of this morning, there was an interesting debate going on in the private Facebook group for first years at my medical school. A student club had just been posting about their campaign to educate our class about the rampant conflict of interest in the medical field, specifically from physicians who receive compensation from drug companies. Fitting perfectly into their narrative, some overly prepared student looking over the upcoming lectures for today noticed that one of our lecturers not only had a slide announcing a conflict of interest, but seemed to have used an entire presentation put together by a pharmaceutical company.

The 1AM hubub was considerable because we had, up until today, never had any presentation that wasn't, with admittedly varied degrees of success, directly put together by one of our professors. How is it that we were already being brainwashed by Big Pharma when we weren't even through our first year of medical school? Why are we paying tuition for a presentation paid for by industry?

When the lecture finally started, no one actually cared about the topic of presentation because we all just wanted to see if the lecturer was the Pharma stooge we had painted him to be that morning. Turns out the presentation was 90% super dry background slides about the physiological basis for the disease process and then a couple case studies of patients that had successfully been treated with the drug. He did a pretty good job of pointing out that the drug in question isn't always right for every patient, though since this topic was his primary area of research, he was solidly in favor of treatment when indicated.

The presenter did seem arrogant and kinda sleazy, but we all agreed it wasn't because of the presentation - that was just him. And like every other presenter we've had, he thought very highly of his own research. Am I glad he had to disclose his conflict of interest? Of course. But am upset that he used a slideshow put together by a drug company that was paying him? Meh. It just showed that he was too lazy to make one himself. I am proud that my classmates and I are involved enough in our own education to have this discussion.

TIL: Artificial growth hormone replacement works really well, sometimes. World renowned endocrinologists can be unpleasant people. All the money in the world still can't buy an interesting presentation.