Do various financial relationships between doctors and the pharmaceutical industry — promotional marketing, paid speaking and consulting, and research funding — compromise patient care, bias medical research, and diminish the integrity of the profession, asks AEI's Sally Satel.

Unfortunately, on many medical-center campuses, the verdict is already in: physicians who engage in any financial relationship with industry are not to be trusted. Such blanket condemnation of all associations with the companies that invent and produce countless life-saving healthcare products will surely have real costs to society, writes Satel.

We can live without free pens and mouse pads. The real threat to medicine and the public interest is suppression of freedom of university-based researchers to interact with their scientific colleagues in the pharmaceutical industry, writes Satel. That might make anti-industry purists feel better — at least until they look for the next breakthrough drug only to find that it doesn't exist.