The Medical Science Liaison (MSL) profession represents the crucial knowledge aspect that bridges the gaps between the pharmaceutical industry and healthcare practitioners. The MSLs responsible for fostering the medical science landscape as they are upgraded with both deep scientific knowledge and soft skills such as communication, collaboration, and relationship-building to build trust with healthcare providers and other stakeholders, the process of educating clinicians about the latest medical and pharmaceutical developments and promoting informed prescribing decisions that ultimately benefit patients and enhance the healthcare. However, there are inherent tensions in this seemingly straightforward task. Taking into account that pharmaceutical companies assign MSLs to provide scientific information and advocate their company’s products while maintaining objectivity in their discussion interactions with healthcare professionals, achieving this delicate balance between promoting and disseminating unbiased scientific information represents a challenge that deserves thoughtful consideration.
The Potential Risks of Advocacy
The main duty of an MSL is to advertise the pharmaceutical products of their companies, emphasizing their safety and efficacy. This action calls for some advocacy, where MSLs highlight the product’s distinct advantages over rivals and present data engagingly. Effective advocacy involves the inherent risk of undermining impartiality, even while it can lead to better patient outcomes through increased access to cutting-edge medicines. Overzealous promotion can distort facts so that data is presented to promote the company’s product while downplaying any potential downsides or other possibilities. This may damage the credibility of medical professionals who depend on MSLs to provide them with accurate, thorough information.
Retaining Impartiality: A Delicate Balancing Act
Every MSL engagement should be based on objectivity. To make knowledgeable judgments concerning patient care, healthcare practitioners need to have access to reliable, objective information. Because of this, MSLs must present a fair assessment by recognizing the limitations of the product offered by their company, including any potential adverse effects and substitute treatment choices. Also, citing reliable sources where instead of relying on anecdotal evidence or subjective beliefs, support their statements with solid scientific data. Also, MSLs must be open and honest about any possible conflicts of interest. Any financial connections to the business or the product they are endorsing should be disclosed. Moreover, they have frank and transparent conversations: Promote inquiry, and attentively hear the worries expressed by medical experts.
Obstacles and the Way Ahead:
It’s difficult to remain objective in the face of inherent advocacy demands. MSLs frequently experience internal pressure to meet sales goals, which may lead them to put promotion ahead of fair information exchange. Further impeding objectivity is the competitive character of the pharmaceutical industry, which can stifle candid conversations regarding a product’s possible downsides. To get over these obstacles, the pharmaceutical industry must encourage an impartial culture, where businesses should place a higher priority on ethics and openness, rewarding MSLs for offering fair information rather than concentrating just on revenue. It also must give instruction and clear guidelines and offer MSLs the information and abilities they need to successfully negotiate moral conundrums and convey scientific facts in an unbiased manner. The industry must encourage candid communication among medical professionals.
To sum up, the MSL profession is crucial to the healthcare industry, yet walking the fine line between objectivity and advocacy is a constant struggle. MSLs and the pharmaceutical industry may collaborate to guarantee that patients receive accurate, unbiased information that ultimately improves health outcomes by placing a high priority on openness, ethical behavior, and open communication. MSLs may become reliable partners in healthcare rather than just product evangelists by making impartiality the cornerstone of their interactions. This will help to ensure that evidence-based medicine becomes the norm in the future.
References:
https://phrma.org/en/resource-center/Topics/STEM/Code-on-Interactions-with-Health-Care-Professionals
https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34236693/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5833064/
https://ce.pharmacy.wisc.edu/blog/evolving-role-medical-science-liaison/
https://www.iqvia.com/locations/united-states/library/articles/medical-science-liaisons-a-new-virtual-reality
About the author:
Yasmin Hamdy Mohamed Hussien
My name is Yasmin Hamdy Mohamed Hussien. I was born in Upper Egypt, in El Minya Governorate. I obtained a bachelor’s degree in pharmacy with distinction (Class of 2022) from Deraya University in Egypt. I studied Pharmaceutical Medicine Postgraduate Program at King’s College London. I am a Peace, Health, and Climate Scholar at the Boutros-Ghali Chair for Sustainable Peace. Also, I serve as a Reviewer at the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker at the University of Oxford. Also, I serve as a writer at the Oxford Personalised Medicine Society (OPMS) Gene Zine Magazine. Additionally, I serve as a Focal Point of Boutros-Ghali Chair for the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn & Child Health (PMNCH). Furthermore, I serve as a UNHCR Young Champion for Refugees. I am the Author of the Child-Friendly Text of the Paris Agreement and the Co-Author of the Child-Friendly Text of the UN Palermo Protocol. My main passion for scientific journalism is to upgrade young people’s mindsets in the context of life science and medical practice.
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