“The fall from grace in September, 2018 of Dr. José Baselga, the former chief scientific officer of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, illuminated a longstanding problem of modern medicine: Potentially corrupting payments by drug and medical device makers to influential people at research hospitals are far more common than either side publicly acknowledges.”  See Full NY Times Editorial.

This tawdry case exposes the greed and amorality of many academic medical researchers.  Since the term the “medical–industrial complex” was first advanced by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in the November 1969 it has been cited on many occasions. Arnold Relman, then editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, discussed it in detail in a 1980 editorial, “The new medical–industrial complex.”  However, the medical journals serve as mouthpieces for academic medicine.  They have been slow to shine light on what I refer to as the Medical-Industrial-Academic Complex.  Our prestigious U.S. journals with their high impact factors publish articles by academic physician-scientists like Jose Baselga, and at the same time have lucrative advertisements for the the new expensive therapies that they have researched.  These journals are marketing tools for PhRMA and device makers and benefit financially from the arrangement.  It’s time to recognize that the Medical-Industrial-Academic complex is a greedy entity that benefits academic medicine and physician researchers.

In the U.S., thanks to the Sunshine Act, we can track some of the offenders.  Sadly, it is not possible to learn what foreign researchers make from industry. The extent that some U.S. academic physicians benefit from working with industry can be found at ProPublica’s Dollars for Docs” site.  For instance, Dr. Sujata Narayan from Stanford Univdersity is listed on Dollars for Docs as having received $59 million in 2014 -2015. The academic dermatologist, Steven Feldman, from  Wake Forest School of Medicine earned > $1.1 million from PhRMA from 2014 – 2016.  During 2018 he received payments from PhRMA on 158 days.