The Social Medicine Portal

National Physicians Alliance "Unbranded Doctor" Campaign

In our last posting we discussed the visit of Dr. Jean Silver-Isenstadt of the National Physicians Alliance.  In this posting we will focus more closely on the NPA “Unbranded Doctor Campaign” part of an attempt to protect integrity and trust in medicine. This campaign asks doctors to stop accepting gifts, however small, from pharmaceutical companies.

The campaign offers resources on how to become an unbranded doctor. Among these is a slideshow from the Madras Medical Group documenting their transition from accepting visits and gifts from pharm reps to becoming “Pharm-free.”  Not as easy as it sounds, particularly since not everyone felt this was a good thing initially.  There are links to videos, including the Frontline Expose A Bitter Pill which discusses the problems with the FDA’s role as watchdog of medication safety in the US.  There is a reading room of both books and articles.  And finally there is a listing of “sources of independent medical information and industry-free CME.

The campaign is being conducted in association with the American Medical Student Association, No Free Lunch, and Pharmed Out.  The website links to several blogs: PostScript, The Carlat Psychiatry Blog, Hooked: Ethics, Medicine, and Pharma, GoozNews, and Pharmalot.

This initiative is also associated with the Prescription Project, an effort “led by Community Catalyst in partnership with the Institute on Medicine as a Profession.  Funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Project seeks to eliminate conflicts of interest created by industry marketing by promoting policy change among academic medical centers, professional medical societies and public and private payers.” The specific platform supported by the Prescription Project are the recommendations published in the January 2006 JAMA.

The Unbranded Doctor campaign is closely associated with several other NPA initiatives.  The Protecting Prescription Privacy Campaign seeks to bar pharmaceutical companies from purchasing prescribing information about individual doctors. This information is used to target Pharma advertising.  They are also supporting S. 2029 The Physician Payments Sunshine Act which seeks to force reporting of pharmaceutical gifts to doctors.

Last, but not least, you can actually buy “Unbranded Doctor” paraphernalia including mugs, T-shirts and wall clocks.  Who would have thought?

Commentary

It is heartening to see the range and depth of activism around this issue, which even involves important elements within “mainstream” academic medicine.  However, it is worth remembering that according to a 2008 article by  Marc-André Gagnon and Joel Lexchin in PLOS: “Pharmaceutical promotion in the United States in 2004 is as high as $57.5 billion compared to the figure of $27.7 billion given by IMS. Excluding direct-to-consumers advertising and promotion towards pharmacists, the industry spent around $61,000 in promotion per practicing physician.”

$61K per doctor! This is truly a Goliath.

Posted by Matt Anderson