The British Medical Journal asks if MS patient advocacy groups are working for pharma, instead of MS patients.
“Any time any organisation takes money from anybody for any purpose there is potential for a conflict of interest,” says Jeremy Taylor, chief executive of National Voices, the national coalition of health and social care charities in England.

But when “a charity advocating for groups of patients takes money from a pharmaceutical company,” the case is even more compelling, he says. “There is the risk of allowing your charitable objectives to be distorted to serve the interests of commercial organisations or simply being seen as serving the commercial need of the other organisations.” http://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g5892


Should patient groups be more transparent about their funding?
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Feature Competing Interests Should patient groups be more transparent about their funding? BMJ 2014; 349 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.g5892 (Published 29 September 2014) Cite this as: BMJ 2014;349:g5892 Article Related content Metrics Responses Peer review Get access to this article and to all…