ProPublica: Medical Groups Sell Companies Access To Their Membership

Concerns about the influence of industry money have prompted universities such as Stanford and the University of Colorado-Denver to ban drug sales representatives from the halls of their hospitals and bar doctors from paid promotional speaking. Yet, one area of medicine still welcomes the largesse: societies that represent specialists. It's a relationship largely hidden from public view, said David Rothman, who studies conflicts of interest in medicine as director of the Center on Medicine as a Profession at Columbia University (Ornstein and Weber, 5/5).