medical students

Drug companies wooing new docs senseless

Right now, thousands of American medical students are packing to return to school, itching for the best darned education $50,000 a year can afford. But when these would-be docs graduate, it looks like they'll be tossing a heck of a lot more than toilet paper and streamers out their dorm windows.

There's a good chance they'll be throwing away every shred of evidence-based science they spent four long years learning. And before you know it, you or someone you love is going to be treated by Mr. Pill Pusher, M.D.

According to a new study from Harvard Medical School, billion-dollar drug companies have hijacked medical education in a filthy, corrupt manner that ought to leave teacher's unions more jealous than a bald man in a wig shop.

But these fat cats aren't just fighting for longer breaks and six-hour workdays -- they're trying to steal the very soul of American medicine.

Researchers found that the more time medical school students spent with Big Pharma reps, the more likely they were to STOP relying on medical journals and evidence to treat patients. Talk about the lazy (and lucrative) way out!

These kids aren't even real doctors yet -- most of them still can't find the hospital john! But just like you -- socking away a few hundred bucks a month into your 401(k) account -- Big Pharma is investing in the future.

Researchers found that drug companies were handing out gifts to medical students and jetting them to tropical medical conferences where they were more likely to read the back of a rum bottle than a journal article.

Interaction with drug company reps increased by a jaw-dropping 169% between students' first and fourth years of medical school. And the kids who spent the most time listening to fairy tales at Uncle Big Pharma's knee were 15% less likely to prescribe drugs based on science!

One of the country's top medical researchers says there's no educational justification for letting drug sales reps within 100 yards of students.

Well, good luck with that. Just a couple months ago, I told you how 94% of the largest drug companies selling into the U.S. market have board members serving in major leadership roles at U.S. medical schools.

You can educate kids or you can cash Big Pharma checks -- but you sure can't (and shouldn't) do both.

It's time to get Big Pharma out of medical education forever. We can start by removing medical schools' accreditations based on drug company ties.

Because drug company reps are like a pack of leaches. They feed off of new doctors -- and the longer you let these silver-tongued salesmen hang on, the fatter and greedier they get.

There's a simple way to stop the spread of disease in hospitals, where drug-resistant germs are running so rampant they're practically taking over: Wash your darned hands.

Yet when it comes to this basic step -- a step we all learned in preschool -- today's leading medical students get an "F."

Only a third of students surveyed at Germany's Hannover Medical School were able to name the five situations in which they need to wash their hands.

For the record, the correct answers are: before contact with a patient, before preparing IV fluids, after removing gloves, after touching the patient's bed, and after contact with vomit.

I hope all of them at least got that last one right -- and if you think any of this is limited to German medical students, you're kidding yourself.

Heck, even our full-grown docs with walls full of degrees and years of experience fail at basic hygiene more often than you'd ever want to know. In some studies, they've been caught red-handed not washing their hands after using the bathroom... even when someone was in the same restroom watching them!

It's not just disgusting -- it's reprehensible. People go into hospitals and die every day not because of the condition that brought them there... but because of infections they picked up IN THE HOSPITAL.

Some 1.7 million patients suffer from hospital-acquired infections in the United States every single year -- and close to 100,000 of them DIE because of those infections.

That's even more than the number of people killed each year by traffic accidents and drug overdoses combined!

Many of these infections and deaths can be prevented with simple common-sense hygiene -- yet neither the doctors of today nor the doctors of tomorrow seem to know what that means.