Conflicts of interest and the future of medicine: the US, France, and Japan

In his book Marc Rodwin, Professor of Law at Suffolk University, analyses the regulation of medical interests. He looks more precisely at doctors’ conflicts of interest that can have an influence on their therapeutic choices which are not necessarily in the patients’ best interest. While society and regulators usually expect doctors to be objective in their therapeutic choices, regulating (or the lack thereof) entrepreneurship of private practitioners, their ownership of medical facilities, their type of employment (private, public or mixed), and forms of remuneration for medical services can create incentives for preferring one medical treatment over another. The initial chapter of the book illustrates these choices by presenting fictional patients from France, the US and Japan who share the same diagnosis, but receive a variety of treatments depending on the economic and regulatory incentive structure of medical practice.