Barry Blackwell’s response to Thomas A. Ban’s response to Blackwell’s response to Ban’s reply to Blackwell’s comment on Ban’s Conflict of Interest: Marketing vs. Education

The difference between us has narrowed not to what the problem is but what to do about it. You express the benevolent but naïve opinion that educators will be educated to stop selling their prestige and opinions to industry by “research that would identify discrete pharmacologically more homogeneous populations.” Both of us hope that long awaited goal can be achieved but this is unlikely if money will still be deployed to bribe susceptible educators with flexible consciences to express opinions for or against a specific product. Greed is embedded in the human genome. Even the most specific of drugs will have properties that can be used to convey advantages of one product over another. Such as onset or duration of action, side effects, cost, ability to measure blood levels etc. These will be embellished by the purchased endorsements of vulnerable educators. The experiment you propose for educators has already been performed with politicians.  There is no sign they can be educated to cease being puppets for the lobbying industry despite the fact that their statements are rigorously judged “true or false” by” PoliticoFact.”

Barry Blackwell

March 5, 2015