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David Healy, the controversial author of, inter alia, Pharmageddon rails against the credulity of many doctors in his latest blog arguing, for example:

Recent estimates suggest companies spend over $50,000 per annum on marketing to each and every doctor in the United States – possibly considerably over $50,000. Despite this, there is not a single medical course on earth that teaches doctors about pharmaceutical company marketing.

Is the highlighted claim correct? Is there no training in standard medical courses that helps doctors develop appropriate scepticism about claims made by pharmaceutical salesmen?

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  • I would expect that to be a part of biomedical ethics class, which AFAIK is required in any med school.
    – vartec
    Jan 2, 2014 at 12:18
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    @vartec I would expect it too. But my expectations and what happens in the real world don't often coincide.
    – matt_black
    Jan 2, 2014 at 13:03

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Here is a recommended curriculum on that subject, published by the American Medical Student Association: Evidence and Recommendations for a Model PharmFree Curriculum

Here is the AMSA's advocacy web site on that subject: http://www.pharmfree.org/

I don't know to what extent they've been successful at introducing any such courses at medical schools.

The topic has been studied (see page 9 of the above document), for example in the following study.

An innovative approach to educating medical students about pharmaceutical promotion.

The authors describe an educational program, in which university pharmacists portrayed pharmaceutical company representatives to model a promotional presentation, that they designed to generate critical thinking among third-year medical students regarding the influence of pharmaceutical representatives on the prescribing practices of physicians. The authors also provide information suggesting that the program increased the uncertainty many students felt about the accuracy and ethics of standard drug "detailing."

If such a study counts as a "course" that shows that there has been at least one such course.

Googling suggests to me that the current formal "state of the art" is (mostly, merely) to ask medical schools to clarify their "conflict of interest" guidelines: http://www.amsascorecard.org/

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  • Perhaps I should modify the question to ask how many doctors will have been exposed to such courses.
    – matt_black
    Jan 2, 2014 at 13:05
  • There does seem to be, at least, some extra-curricular awareness of the phenomenon.
    – ChrisW
    Jan 3, 2014 at 15:01
  • The issue might be around terminology. While there are probably no medical schools that have a standalone course that is formally titled, "Introduction to Intermediate Concepts in Advanced Best Practices in Understanding and Evaluating Pharmaceutical Marketing" and for which students receive a discrete grade on their transcript, that's not the same thing as saying that medical schools don't cover the concept at all.
    – Robert Columbia
    Jan 31, 2020 at 18:11

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