Letter: Is limiting industry gifts a smart policy?

In a perfect world the policy made sense, but in the real world, this is another policy that some bio-ethicist who has nothing better to do dreamt up in his office.

The AMA was wrong years ago on this. For example, pharmaceutical companies can no longer support Continuing Medical Education (CME) dinner meetings if a spouse is to attend. The net result is that I do not attend these functions. I do not want these events to be another evening away from my family besides night calls. So the turnout for these functions have dropped dramatically. The flip side is that I do not have the slightest clue what products the pharmaceutical companies make, so there is the big hole in the "undue influence” argument.

The Society of Critical Care dropped pharmaceutical industry support for providing lunch at their annual meeting in order to avoid any possibility of being improperly influenced. The net result is the exhibit hall is like a ghost town during lunch hours whereas in the years before this policy was adopted the hall was usually full. I am equally helpless in telling you who was paying for lunch boxes in the prior years. This type of overly-cautious policy is detrimental to everyone. Pharma companies are not willing to pay high fees to rent exhibit hall space if no physician is around to talk to them. And we as physicians are missing the chance to be exposed to some genuinely new products at these meeting.

This is why I would never be a member of the AMA. Organized medicine believes in appearance and superficialities and not in common sense.

Yours truly,

Mike Wei, M.D.