The relationship between the physician and pharmaceutical industry: background ethics and regulation proposals

Pharmaceutical funding plays an important role in medical progress. Thus, clinical and academic research has been significantly commercialized (1). There are data to suggest that economic interest from industry may have a negative influence on the objectivity of science, research publication, and even patient management (2,3). For example, a manufacturing company has been engaged “... in misleading practices to promote the prescription and usage of rofecoxib, including ‘fake’ journals and guidelines to ‘drug reps’ that minimised the adverse cardiovascular risks” (4). Industry-sponsored reports are up to four times as likely to favor a pharmaceutical company’s product compared to independently published data (5).