How academic medicine can confront commercial determinants of health

AI Summary

The article argues that academic medicine should address how commercial interests in sectors such as tobacco, fossil fuels, chemicals, and food affect health and equity. It calls on academic and health stakeholders, policymakers, and medical professionals to scrutinize these influences beyond the pharmaceutical industry.

Academic medicine bridges healthcare and academia, pursuing the dual aims of training medical professionals and advancing knowledge to improve health and wellbeing of the population and planet equitably.1 Corporate interests across multiple industries, including tobacco, fossil fuels, chemicals, and food, pose a threat to both aims. Academic medicine has many stakeholders, including the academic community, health organisations, policymakers, the medical workforce, and students, and all have the power to act.Medical scholars have acknowledged many harmful business practices, focused mostly on the pharmaceutical sector and the risks arising from conflicts of interest.234 Although some medical professionals have taken action against these harms,5 academic medicine has largely neglected to consider how commercial actors and industries beyond the healthcare sector influence other aspects of health and health equity more generally—for example, the privatisation and corporatisation of many social determinants of health, including housing and education. This is despite the clinically relevant and often...