Helen MacDonald

helps you to sort that in yeah so the key point of this uh paper was to make the point that financial entanglement is distorting the production and use of health care evidence and harming individuals and wasting um health system resources and in this paper the bmj were joining together with some other um a kind of diverse collection of um people interested in this area who's that who's what who are those diverse people

Well, there's like 12 different authors on there from different places.

Do you want me to... No, no, no.

To say that we can... So we joined with this group of authors to make the point that we've got to a point in our understanding now where it's clear that certain people or certain organisations with vested commercial interests...

No, that's not right.

So we've got to a point now where what we're really trying to say is that evidence and education and practice needs to be increasingly independent from commercial financial ties.

And if you need a few stats, there were a few in there picking out some of the problems, for example, that...

Around 60% of research in the US is funded by industry and that work typically finds in favour of those funders' products.

Sponsored education often presents information which is more favourable towards products and guidelines and recommendations for practice that are produced by people with financial ties or organisations with financial ties tend to expand disease categories significantly.

tend to increase testing and recommend increasing treatment and the point of this paper is to say that things should be different and actually that we're starting to see that they are different and what we wanted to do was to try and present some examples of how research and education and practice are moving in that direction so for example

In research, the Italian government taxes drug companies in order to then spend that money on research which is in the public interest.

In education, the Norwegian Medical Association has said that they are not going to have industry-sponsored meetings and courses.

And if you go to those courses, they will not be counted as formal education or be accredited.

We can see that similarly for patients, advocacy organisations in the US and National Women's Health Network are freeing themselves from industry funding.

And in practice, there are lots of examples where clinicians are ending their reliance on company sales representatives with groups such as No Gracias and No Advertising Please and Messis, encouraging the use of information which is produced independently from drug makers.

And what we're calling for in this paper is for people to join us and to sign up.

And I'm sure Duncan will be happy to put the link in for this to sign up to say that you support this idea of independence from industry.

We want to hear your ideas on what you or other people could be doing to make things better and more independent.

And we want you to write to us with your examples of what you're doing, because we want to publish these and make clear that this is a problem that we can solve.

It's not insoluble and things can be done and are being done successfully.