It's a very good question.
I think part of the answer goes back to remarks I read in a transcript of an earlier hearing, I think by Dr. Eyolfson, that the level of education about drugs of Canadian medical students and doctors has declined drastically in the last 20 or 30 years. Dr. Anne Holbrook also made this point to your committee. I was very glad to see that, because it's something that those of us in clinical pharmacology—my training is similar to Dr. Holbrook's or Dr. Juurlink's—have been lamenting for years. We've been absolutely impotent to change the trend of curriculum change. I do not think this is a conspiracy of the pharmaceutical industry. I think we did the damage to ourselves in the medical schools.
Before coming here, I asked some of my current fourth-year medical students if they had anything to say to the committee. Their advice was that they need much better education about the use of drugs, that they need it back in the curriculum, and that they need non-conflicted teachers. We cannot have our teachers decline to show their conflicts and clearly giving a sales pitch for a drug company, like the ad that I passed around. This should be elementary in any modern university in 2016, but it is not yet, for reasons that I alluded to earlier.
I had the opportunity to make that point directly, face to face, as close as I am to Ms. Silas, with the dean of our medical school 10 years ago, and I think he thought I was out of my mind, nuts. Please, I'm not. Talk to the students or come to some of the lectures. Just as drug therapy has become much more complicated, as Ms. Yale has referred to, knowledge has gone down. This is something that will require enormous efforts to undo, and it requires public education too.
Another step that would help it is if Health Canada were more transparent and the common drug reviews were more transparent and better promoted so that an intelligent layperson, such as you, not trained in medicine, could read for yourself and draw your own conclusions. There's no reason an intelligent, reasonably educated person with a high school degree in this country should not be able to understand whether a drug really benefits someone or not.