Surveys routinely rank doctors and other healthcare professionals at the top of the list when it comes to inspiring trust. And with good reason: if we didn't trust our doctors and nurses, we would not place our lives and those of our loved ones in their hands. After all, you need to summon up a lot more faith in the woman who is going to operate on your heart than you do in the man who does your dry cleaning.

That being said, the public's faith in medicine as a profession has been severely tested in recent years with the repeated exposure of dubious collaborations between physicians and the pharmaceutical industry to promote new medications and make more money, with the well being of the public almost an afterthought. While there are increasing efforts to regulate the relationships between the pharmaceutical industry and physicians, it will take a lot of work to repair the damage which has been done.

Carl Elliott M.D. has written an excellent and very thought provoking chronicle of some of these egregious misdoings (White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine). A review of it in today's edition of the Boston Globe can be found here: