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To the Editor: I believe that the study on medical student exposure to drug company interactions by Dr Sierles and colleagues¹ came to the wrong conclusions. I recognize the need to protect naive students from pharmaceutical marketing that may lead to unrecognized influence on their choices of therapeutic agents. However, it seems duplicitous to criticize students for receiving gifts when they see their mentors giving lectures, doing research, and traveling using pharmaceutical money. Students are encouraged to read high-quality medical journals, which contain many advertisements for some of the most expensive pharmaceuticals currently marketed (including the issue of JAMA in which this study was published).

Medicine is both an idealistic profession and a business. The profession is inextricably bound to the pharmaceutical companies, and most of our journals, conferences, and therapeutics would not be available without them. I believe the article's conclusion that "research should focus on evaluating methods to . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Michael Eisman, MD
dreisman@htva.net
Hector Falls Integrative Medicine
Burdett, NY

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