AMSA: Tide Has Turned in Medical Schools

AMSA, the American Medical Student Association, can justly claim pride of place in the near-revolution that has occurred in academic medicine over the past half-decade. AMSA developed the astoundingly successful propaganda ploy, their "report card" on institutional COI policies. Deans that had never been bothered about how many of their faculty were in bed with Pharma (just keep those lucrative grants coming in, boys and girls) suddenly developed an abiding concern about COI when it was splashed across the local news that their medical school had been given an F on AMSA's report card. My own stomping ground, UTMB-Galveston, went from an F to an A pretty promptly when spurred on by AMSA (though personally I would not place my own Dean in the "never been bothered" category).

AMSA now reports a new survey showing that now a majority of US medical schools have policies that they consider "strong" in policing drug industry COI. They also add that, "Nearly one-third of medical schools now teach medical students to understand institutional conflict of interest policies, to recognize how industry promotion and marketing can influence clinical judgment and to consider the ethics around conflict of interest." See the entire AMSA press release at http://www.amsa.org/AMSA/Homepage/About/News/121510.aspx.