Although many popular accounts have contrasted the contemporary influence of pharmaceutical marketing in clinical practice with a nostalgic remembrance of uncomplicated relations between physicians and the pharmaceutical industry at mid-century, the relationship between pharmaceutical promotion and physician education had already prompted significant professional and public debate in the 1950s and 1960s. This talk will use historical perspective to explore the problem of industrial vs. professional sources in how physicians incorporate emerging therapeutics into their practice. Tracing the issue from the advent of the postwar ‘wonder drugs’ through today’s concerns regarding industry influencer in formal continuing medical education (CME) and off-label prescribing, this talk will document how and why the pharmaceutical industry was allowed to develop and maintain the central role it now plays within postgraduate medical education and prescribing practice. The talk will also explore paths not taken: alternate structures for medical education and the diffusion of medical innovation that were abandoned along the way.
Lecture by: Jeremy Greene, M.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University, and the Harvard Medical School Division of Pharmacoepidemiology
Date: Thursday, 21 May 2009, 4:30 p.m.
Location: Louis Jolyon West Auditorium, Semel Institute, C8-183 Center for the Health Sciences, UCLA
The lecture is open, free of charge, and is followed by an opportunity to converse over light refreshments in the foyer.
This lecture is co-sponsored by the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. For more information, please contact the History & Special Collections for the Sciences, Louise Darling Biomedical Library at 310.825.6940 or via email at: tgj@library.ucla.edu.
<submitted by Russell Johnson>