Putting a FIRE Under Healthcare Professionals to Give Them a Voice

On Monday I had breakfast with Neil Shulman and Adam Kissel of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Adam was extremely helpful last year related to the topic of academic freedom, and we have been having discussions with him about the topic of freedom of speech within the field of healthcare. A lot of doctors drank the cool aid that they should be dishing out the party line of pharmaceutical companies or other money making ventures, like hospitals and medical device makers. Also, medical schools are a part of large medical center behemoths that often deceptively identify themselves as non-profit, although their CEOs are making hundreds of thousands of dollars in pay. Also, half of research in the US is funded by pharma, and that is money that is all funneled through the medical schools. This and the fact that medical care in the US is driven by profit makes many doctors afraid to speak out. Inhibition of freedom of speech is antithetical to the free exchange of ideas that is required for research and education to move forward. In addition, putting a profit motive on denial or compromise of care is demoralizing to doctors and other healthcare professionals. We think there will be a lot of interest in a conference that emphasize the topic of free speech in medicine, a topic that hasn’t been covered before.