Stanford’s School of Medicine has distinguished itself in its research and its medical care. It has again done an admirable job of staying ahead of the curve, this time in the field of ethics.

Two weeks ago, the influential Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) issued guidelines urging every medical school in the country to heavily restrict gifts from the pharmaceutical industry. The AAMC guidelines would forbid faculty and students from the common practices of accepting handouts such as free travel, free meals and the ghost-writing of academic papers. Although AAMC recommendations are non-binding, nearly all medical schools follow them closely.

But Stanford has beaten the AAMC to the punch. Stanford’s School of Medicine adopted similarly strict conflict-of-interest policies in October 2006, after a University-appointed task force recommended the changes. Although a handful of faculty members expressed opposition, the School of Medicine Dean Philip Pizzo, along with Stanford’s Center for Biomedical Ethics, championed these new conflict-of-interest guidelines and helped make them institutional policy. Their accomplishment is commendable, and Stanford’s policies are already some of the most rigorous in the country.

The institutional changes address the excessive gifts that industry provides doctors. According to an April New York Times article regarding the AAMC’s recommendations:

“Drug companies spend billions wooing doctors — more than they spend on research or consumer advertising. Medical schools, packed with prominent professors and impressionable trainees, are particularly attractive marketing targets.

“So companies have for decades provided faculty and students free food and gifts, offered lucrative consulting arrangements to top-notch teachers and even ghost-written research papers for busy professors.”

These gifts in turn boost the pharmaceutical companies’ bottom line. Study after study demonstrates that these industry gifts have some measurable effect on doctors’ prescribing habits.

The substantial costs of these outlandish gifts make drugs more expensive for patients. And doctors that accept industry gifts — or medical students taught by professors who accept these gifts — cannot be expected to make the best, medically-sound decisions for their patients. By banning most pharmaceutical gifts, Stanford is acting ethically, is providing its patients with a higher standard of medical care and is helping to fix our country’s badly broken health care system.

The medical school is currently reviewing other ways in which industry may be influencing its faculty and students. A School of Medicine Task Force on Industry Support for Continuing Medical Education will deliver its own findings in the coming months. This is heartening news. We hope that Dean Pizzo and Stanford’s School of Medicine will continue to lead the nation in eliminating conflicts of interest from its research, teaching and medical care.