Drug Firms, the Codification of Diagnostic Categories, and Bias in Clinical Guidelines by Lisa Cosgrove and Emily Wheeler in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, Vol. 14, No. 3, 2013 at the Social Science Research Network
This is a very readable document. It has sixteen pages of text, and the rest of the pages are filled with references.
“…the problem is not quid pro quo corruption involving the individual “bad apple”; the problem is the “bad barrel.”
The profession of medicine is predicated upon an ethical mandate: first do no harm. However, critics charge that the medical profession’s culture and its public health mission are being undermined by the pharma-ceutical industry’s wide-ranging influence. In this article, we analyze how drug firms influence psychiatric taxonomy and treatment guidelines such that these resources may serve commercial rather than public health interests. Moving beyond a conflict-of-interest model, we use the conceptual and normative framework of institutional corruption to examine how organized psychiatry’s dependence on drug firms has distorted science. We suggest that academic-industry relationships have led to the corruption of the evidence base upon which accurate diagnosis and sound treatment depend. We describe the current dependency
corruption and argue that transparency alone is not a solution—and sometimes even produces
iatrogenic effects. Furthermore, we argue that the corruption of the evidence base for diagnostic and practice guidelines renders obsolete the traditional informed consent process, and we offer suggestions for reforming this process.
from this great reading list by Doctor Mickey Nardo
