Med Page Today Interviews Dr. Paul Appelbaum and Me on Industry Relationships

Yesterday, John Gever of Med Page Today interviewed me and Dr. Paul Appelbaum on various topics about the relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and psychiatry, which I have posted above for your viewing pleasure. Dr. Appelbaum is a former president of the APA and is the chairman of the "Ad Hoc Work Group on Relationships Between Psychiatrists and Medical Industries." He and the members of this group have drafted a report with recommendations for how we can clean up our act. While the report has not yet been formally approved by the Board of Trustees and is therefore not public, I can tell you that it contains many of the same elements as the recent Institute of Medicine report, which I described here. Appelbaum's report was discussed in the APA Assembly on Sunday and the review was frankly somewhat mixed. What will happen next is that the Board of Trustees will continue to elicit feedback from the APA membership and will eventually vote on whether to adopt some version of the current report. My prediction is that the current version will be adopted with very few changes, but that's only a prediction (I'm not a member of the Board, just the Assembly).

There have been a number of excellent symposia over the last few days on how to set the right distance between doctors and commercial interests and I'm coming away from this meeting with high optimism that we are really turning a corner in our profession.