FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Washington, DC (April 27, 2015) — For millennia, human survival has depended on our innate abilities to fight pathogens and repair injuries. Only in recent history has medical science improved the quality of our lives and assured longevity. While physicians and academic researchers contribute to such progress, the principal contributor is private industry, which produces the tools — drugs and medical devices — that enable doctors to prevent and cure diseases. Unfortunately, heavy regulation and biology’s complexity and unpredictability make medical innovation extremely difficult and expensive.
In PHARMAPHOBIA: How the Conflict of Interest Myth Undermines American Medical Innovation (Rowman & Littlefield, April 2015), Tom Stossel, MD, a well-known hematologist and an AEI scholar, describes how an ideological crusade stretching over the last quarter-century, using distortion and flawed logic in pursuit of theoretical professional purity, has made medical innovation even harder.
As Dr. Stossel explains in PHARMAPHOBIA, bureaucrats, reporters, politicians, and predatory lawyers have built careers attacking the medical products industry, belittling its critical contributions to medical innovation and accusing it of nonexistent malfeasance including overselling product value, flaunting safety, and corrupting physicians and academics who partner with it. The mania has imposed “conflict-of-interest” regulations limiting or banning valuable interactions between industry, physicians, and researchers while diverting scarce resources away from medical research and innovation and toward dealing with compliance issues.
At the heart of this destructive conflict-of-interest movement is the false “insinuation that the medical products industry and those who partner with it are corrupt, placing personal profit above providing medical value.” According to this movement, the performance and dissemination of research done by industry, or by industry-sponsored academic researchers, is untrustworthy. Equally suspect are efforts to make practitioners aware of such products and explain how to use them. The regulations that flow from this false narrative have undermined scientific progress and stifled American medical innovation.
As Dr. Stossel demonstrates, the real victims are patients suffering from cancer, dementia, and other serious diseases for which new treatments are delayed, reduced, or eliminated as a result of these pointless regulations. With powerful detail, Dr. Stossel — a physician-researcher who has worked extensively in the biotechnology industry — shows how attacking doctors who work with industry limits medical innovation and prevents new life-saving products from reaching patients. He then suggests what can be done to support American medical innovation and stop this dangerous conflict-of-interest movement.
PHARMAPHOBIA does the following:
- Authoritatively documents how private industry is the major engine of medical innovation, which requires a partnership between industry, physicians, and universities;
- Details the extensive damage done to medical innovation by excessive conflict-of-interest allegations and the resulting stifling regulations; and
- Proposes how Americans who care about medical innovation should resist the vested interests that have created the damaging allegations and regulations.
For interview requests or for a copy of the book, please contact Paige Tenkhoff at paige.tenkhoff@aei.org or 202.862.5904.
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