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Professional Medical Organizations and Commercial Conflicts of Interest: Ethical Issues
Howard Brody
This essay addresses the recent controversy over the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) accepting a large corporate donation from The Coca-Cola Company to fund patient education materials on obesity prevention. The author argues that accepting funds from commercial sources that seek to influence physician organization behavior in a direction that could run counter to the public health constitutes a conflict of interest. He asserts that many of the defenses offered by AAFP leadership are rationalizations rather than sound ethical counterarguments. Medical organizations, as the public face of medicine and as formulator of codes of ethics for their physician members, have special obligations to adhere to high ethical standards.