Healthy Disclosure

The diagnosis is in, and Harvard Medical School is still a little under the weather—not from the common cold or chicken pox, but because of its faculty’s nebulous relationships with drug companies. The practice of pharmaceutical companies having contracts with medical professors is not peculiar to Harvard—collaboration and financial backing of doctors by pharmaceuticals is common in the field. What is unique at HMS, however, is that these relationships are not openly disclosed to the student body or the public.

The lack of transparency in these partnerships has aroused quite a stir among HMS students uncomfortable with the influence that drug companies may have on their professors’ course material, and with good reason. Harvard’s policy of not disclosing its teachers’ ties to drug companies must end. Similar to common practice at other medical schools, HMS must create a uniform and standardized way of disclosing its faculty members’ ties to their funding, regardless of the effort it will take to collect this data.

Medicine and medical research are clearly not immune from the tough economic climate now facing every other aspect of society. Therefore, potential changes to conflict-of-interest policies should not diminish the beneficial cooperation between pharmaceuticals and medical schools but instead make this collaboration widely publicized. Beyond grants, drug companies still comprise a major source of funding for medical research, and this interdependence cannot change.

While research funding should stay constant, what must come to an end is the accompanying gifts doctors sometimes receive from drug companies—money that provides no benefit to the research being done. These gifts, similar to political kickbacks, only work to bias professors and physicians in their care and teaching, thereby harming students and patients.

There has been some progress with this information disclosure campaign, and the recent ruling that students must be informed of their professors’ affiliations is a small step in the right direction. Pressure also to expedite this process has come from U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, who has requested that Pfizer—one of the leading pharmaceutical companies—disclose its ties to HMS. We are pleased to see that Pfizer has agreed to this request, but the impetus for funding transparency must come from the Harvard Medical School itself for credibility upon which medical education depends to be reestablished.