Financial equivalent, industry sponsored research and conflict of interest

Conflicts of interest for the clinician(physician)-researcher are not limited only to direct and clear financial support by manufacturers of the pharmaceutical and medical device industry, but rather include delicate indirect monetary and research support. Today professionals face an inevitable choice between two opposing moral orders, one based in the primacy of ethical obligations to the sick, the other in the primacy of self-interest and the marketplace. Some medical ethicists urge, reshape ethical codes to conform to the ethos of the marketplace, which legitimates self-interest over beneficence and makes vices out of most of traditional virtues. Second opinion represents the ethicists who recommend a firm stand in belief that being a physician imposes certain specific obligations. Medicine is at heart a moral enterprise and those who practice it are de facto members of a moral community. The market introduces an alien-till this time unknown-set of economic values into an institution (medicine) whose inherent ends are altruistic, but in countries under health care reform it brings a complex of special ethical issues in connection with deficient legislation and not firm ethical rules adopted. (Ref. 17.)