DRUG DEALERS EXPOSED

Harvard Medical School students like Kirsten Austad, left; Lekshmi Santhosh, Kim
Sue and David Tian, members of the American Medical Student Association, object
to the influence of drug companies in the school’s educational curriculum

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The capitalist society in its insatiable quest for profits corrupts everything it touches. Even in the supposedly benevolent field of health treatment this profit based society injures the very people it is supposed to benefit. If profits can be made human suffering comes a bad also-ran to company’s profit and loss considerations. Here is a particularly nasty example of this capitalist trait.

"In a first-year pharmacology class at Harvard Medical School, Matt Zerden grew wary as the professor promoted the benefits of cholesterol drugs and seemed to belittle a student who asked about side effects. Mr. Zerden later discovered something by searching online that he began sharing with his classmates. The professor was not only a full-time member of the Harvard Medical faculty, but a paid consultant to 10 drug companies, including five makers of cholesterol treatments. “I felt really violated,” Mr. Zerden, now a fourth-year student, recently recalled. “Here we have 160 open minds trying to learn the basics in a protected space, and the information he was giving wasn’t as pure as I think it should be.” Mr. Zerden’s minor stir four years ago has lately grown into a full-blown movement by more than 200 Harvard Medical School students and sympathetic faculty, intent on exposing and curtailing the industry influence in their classrooms and laboratories, as well as in Harvard’s 17 affiliated teaching hospitals and institutes." (New York Times, 3 March) RD