New Study Shows Depth of Commercial Influence
GreenMedInfo LLC
Professional education events are heavily sponsored by drug companies promoting their products as the solution. This widely used coercive and misinformation technique where drug risks are exaggerated and side effects minimized was exposed in a recent BMJ Open study.
The online medical journal BMJ Open recently published a retrospective cohort study titled Does industry-sponsored education foster overdiagnosis and overtreatment of depression, osteoporosis and overactive bladder syndrome? An Australian cohort study. Looking at publicly reported industry-sponsored events in Australia from October 2011 to September 2015, the researchers focused on three conditions subject to over diagnosis and over treatment: depression, osteoporosis and overactive bladder.
Over the 4-year study period 3,132 events were identified consisting of approximately 96,660