Doctors in teaching hospitals should lead the way in refusing to take gifts from the pharmaceutical and medical device industries, because it damages the reputation of the profession, a leading article in JAMA said this week (2006;295: 429-33).

The article was published in the month that, during a whistleblower court case originating in Memphis, Tennessee, some spine surgeons were exposed as having accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from a medical devices company for undertaking limited amounts of work.

The JAMA article, which generated widespread publicity, with articles in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, pointed …