'You're Not Just a Paid Monkey Reading Slides:' How Key Opinion Leaders Explain and Justify Their Work

Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) are physicians and researchers hired or engaged by pharmaceutical companies, often to speak to audiences of other physicians. This paper provides some background information on the structures of pharmaceutical company influence on and control over KOLs, and then focuses on KOLs’ explanations and justifications of their paid work for the companies. Among their important justifications are ones in terms of the educational value of the talks they give, and the benefits gained by patients; these are buttressed by claims about the integrity of the speakers. However, KOLs rarely address larger issues to do with the influence that pharmaceutical companies have on medical knowledge, issues not addressed by the KOLs’ integrity.