Ethics and the Business of Biomedicine

During the last thirty years we have witnessed sweeping changes in health care worldwide, including new and expensive biomedical technologies, an increasingly powerful and influential pharmaceutical industry, steadily increasing health care costs in industrialised nations, and new threats to medical professionalism. The essays collected in this book concern costs and profits in relation to just health care, the often controversial practices of pharmaceutical companies, and corruption in the professional practice of medicine. Leading experts discuss justice in relation to business-friendly strategies in the delivery of health care, access to life saving drugs, the ethics of pharmaceutical company marketing practices, exploitation in drug trials, and undue industry influence over medicine. They offer guidance regarding the ethical delivery of health care products and services by profit-seeking organisations operating in a global marketplace, and recommend pragmatic solutions to enhance organisational integrity and curb medical corruption in the interest of patient welfare.

Introduction, 1. Medicine and the market Daniel Callahan; 2. Broken promises: do business friendly strategies frustrate just health care? Norman Daniels; 3. Are patents an efficient and internationally fair means of funding research and development for new medicines? Paul Menzel; 4. The exploitation of the economically disadvantaged in pharmaceutical research disclosure Tom L. Beauchamp; 5. The dangers of detailing: how pharmaceutical marketing threatens health care Jason Hubbard; 6. The ethics of direct to consumer pharmaceutical advertising Denis G. Arnold; 7. Industry-funded bioethics and the limits of disclosure Carl Elliott; 8. Two cheers for the pharmaceutical industry Richard T. De George; 9. The third face of medicine: ethics and business and challenges to professionalism Mary V. Rorty, Patricia Werhane, and Ann Mills; 10. Theoretical foundations for an organizational ethics: developing norms for a new kind of health care George Khushf; 11. A crisis in medical professionalism: time for Flexner II Daniel Wikler; Bibliography; Index.