What Does the AAFP Do With All the Money?
Here is a recent AAFP newsletter. I have mentioned before that they are selling out with ads to look like stories. This week’s edition had no shame in starting right out with the American Heart Association. Bang. They come back later with this one:
Wow, the makers of Diflucan must love this. Or hate that they didn’t pay enough to be “highlighted”.
Why does the AAFP need to sell out like this? Where is all this money going?
I know that other blogs and newsletters will blend in ads and make them look like real stories. It’s shady. It’s gross. But in my opinion it is disgraceful for a medical newsletter from the AAFP to allow these advertisers to use THEIR studies as the ad.
Am I wrong here?
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I want to know where they get there money in the first place. What percentage of FPs are members not including students and residents. I couldn’t find that information. I had read an article they were getting money from drug companies.
Two questions you posed.
1. Don’t know what the AAFP does with the money. Splits it with the people who do the newsletter is my guess.
2. Any well trained medical person sees right through these. I do. Not good and not bad, just not as effective.
Once you own the podium, you own the facts. Once you own the facts, you own the ideas. Once you own the ideas, you own the opinions. Once you own the podium, you own the mind.
And once you own the journal, you own the pipeline of “facts.” You have to trust the honesty of the owners.
The reason that experience is being eliminated from medicine is it teaches you inconvenient truths. Rather than argue the point, I offer you this. I’ve never seen a case of lactic acidosis from metformin in 20 years. The literature states:
“There is no evidence from prospective comparative trials or from observational cohort studies that metformin is associated with an increased risk of lactic acidosis, or with increased levels of lactate, compared to other anti‐hyperglycemic treatments. ” https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD002967.pub4/full
“It appears that metformin itself may not increase the risk for lactic acidosis.” [Is Metformin Associated With Lactic Acidosis?] January 26, 2019 (https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/714920)
But this error has remained in the “literature” without being expunged, because metformin is cheap, effective and safe. Why haven’t the drug companies found an even more effective biguanide? $$$$ they’re too cheap.
Why is aspirin never used for pain? Because of the campaign of the COX-2 inhibitors to suggest they are “safer.”
And inexperienced people learn things by rote memorization. Experienced people learn by experience. That gives them undesirable power. Who do you want prescribing – some old family practice doctor with 30 years experience, or a new-minted doc-in-the-box NP in Wal-Mart-Greens?
If you want antibiotics and narcotics you don’t want the experienced FP for sure.
Well said.