Página 138 - Dimensiones éticas de las regulaciones en salud

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brochure is a very complex task which requires specialized expertise that
not all the RECs have(10).
Physicians acting as researchers in industry sponsored
research
Financial conflict of interest is one of the most important, however, not
often discussed and not clearly regulated issue in many countries includ-
ing European transition societies. The problem is that researchers in the
region (as compared to economically more affluent societies) have a rela-
tively stronger incentive to conduct clinical trials proposed by pharma-
ceutical companies because the benefits offered in the transition societies
are relatively much higher than in Western countries. For example, the
payments received by the researchers in remuneration for conducting a
clinical trial could very well exceed their regular salaries as clinicians, espe-
cially if we add such “subtle” types of remuneration as the reimbursement
of expenses for overseas conferences and the like. This argument carries
the most weight in the CEE countries with the largest difference between
the income of healthcare practitioners and the remuneration offered by
the pharmaceutical industry(5) .
A researcher who is entangled into the conflict of interest (e.g., due to
the fact that he acts both as an investigator as well as a treating physician)
might distort or manipulate the results of the study and what is more
important to our discussion, to interfere with the autonomy or welfare of
the research participant due to a biased interpretation of relevant features
of the trial and/or a wish to enroll a sufficient number of research partici-
pants(11). This is why the conflict of interest is closely linked to the prob-
lematic practices of obtaining informed consent from the research partici-
pants. Combined with the tradition of medical paternalism, the financial
incentive to enroll research participants makes it very likely that some of
the basic principles of research ethics may not be followed in the circum-
stances. Surprisingly, there are very few publications on this topic when
considering the importance of the conflicts of interest to protect the rights