A Tufts University professor has drawn the ire and critique of US Senator Charles Grassley for simultaneously working for the federal government, Tufts University Medical Center, and a heart device company. According to a Boston Globe report, “The specialist, Dr. Marvin Konstam, was hired in January as a senior adviser to the director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, wrote Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, in a letter sent yesterday to Dr. Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health.
But just last week, Grassley noted, Orqis, the private California company where Konstam is medical director, sent out a press release in which Konstam praised one of its products, a minimally invasive device for helping heart-failure patients. The press release identified Konstam as a professor of medicine at Tufts.”
The question the public needs to ask, who’s the doctor working for? It seems quite clear he shouldn’t be the medical director for a private medical device company as well as drawing compensation from the government and an educational institution both of which are either supposed to be watchdogs for the public or committed to unbiased medical research. This is an example of how doctors can become entangled and conflicted when they are compensated as pitchmen for a medical device or drug while at the same time responsible for research and an unbiased judgment on the efficacy and safety of the same medical device or drug.