Ninety six per cent of those voting in a poll conducted by the BMJ on its website (bmj.com) would like to see all financial relationships between doctors and drug companies conducted with transparent contracts that are disclosed to patients.
Table 1.
Responses (percentage of respondents) to the eight questions in BMJ poll
| Yes | No | Don't know | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Would you like doctors to stop seeing drug company representatives, replacing them with more independent sources of health information? | 79 | 15 | 4 |
| Would you like doctors to stop receiving all forms of direct and indirect gifts from drug companies? | 84 | 13 | 2 |
| Would you like industry-funded education of doctors replaced by education funded by more independent sources? | 84 | 9 | 4 |
| Would you like doctors' professional associations and their peer-reviewed journals to reduce their reliance on industry funding to specified maximum levels? | 85 | 7 | 5 |
| Would you like all financial relationships between doctors and drug companies conducted with transparent contracts that are disclosed to patients and the public? | 96 | 1 | 1 |
| Would you like mechanisms that genuinely create more distance and independence between doctor/researchers and their research sponsors? | 83 | 9 | 5 |
| Would you like government/public agency advisory panels, which are responsible for independent assessment of medical products or health policies, to reduce their reliance on doctors with financial ties to drug companies? | 87 | 6 | 4 |
| Would you like to see these sorts of changes become the basis of a charter for a new relationship between doctors and drug companies? | 90 | 5 | 3 |
A total of 1479 people responded to the questions. The poll was conducted after the BMJ published its theme issue “Time to Untangle Doctors from Drug Companies” (31 May) (see also www.bmj.com/collections/specials.shtml).