Opinion : A plan to get rid of undue Pharmaceutical influence

In the last two years or so, there has been a lot of progress and publicity on the issue of pharmaceutical companies influencing medical trials. This article in Slate adds some useful information to the debate by uncovering new insidious ways that pharmaceutical companies are wielding influence on science. While the author's solution of making journals follow the same disclosure that scientists do is a good start, I think that there is a much better way to solve the whole situation. The best way to promote full disclosure in the pharmaceutical industry is simply to require each pharmaceutical company to submit a detailed and itemized list of all the parties that they have spent promotional or development money on for each budget year.

I would imagine that this is neither a difficult solution to legislate, or to comply with. It could be a simple form that is attached to the company's regular SEC filings for each fiscal year. This would create a government mandate for public disclosure that could be reviewed by accountants and for which executives could be held accountable. I am sure that some place in each company there exists a detailed lists of expenditures so that each company can track how effective these are. I cannot think of any objections to the public interest for mandating that each company make these itemized reports available to the public. While I realize that few people would bother to look their doctor up, it would give activists and investigators an important tool to demand accountability of healthcare professionals. This tool would also enable stronger peer review as conflicts of interest would be readily apparent to other scientists and scientific editors.