No conflict of interest, except they're directly paid by drug companies. That's the sort of thing you'd expect to see in a banana republic, not established medicine. It should call the integrity of the entire system into question, frankly.
Do you really want to ban all interactions between researchers/clinicians and drug companies?
Scientific articles are published and read by the community. There are, for example, social media and messaging groups where doctors will post and discuss articles, including their methododology and limitations. There's always the possibility that the study could actually be relevant.
Drug company representatitives talk to doctors in private in order to try and convince them to prescribe drugs. Like all marketing, there's an inherent dishonesty to it. You always assume they're overstating the positives, downplaying the negatives and ignoring alternatives. Doing this is actually the doctor's job. It's our job to pick these claims apart and figure out what's true and what isn't so that patients don't have to do it.
Doctor-drug industry relationship is at its healthiest when they're just giving doctors free samples of the drugs they were already going to prescribe anyway. Doesn't change the doctor's conduct and helps patients with free medicine. Doctors are already going to prescribe angiotensin receptor blockers for hypertension, drug company representatives won't change that. They can and should provide free samples though, free medication helps everyone.
Everything a drug company does is ultimately about selling more drugs. It's not limited to the drug reps.
> they're overstating the positives, downplaying the negatives and ignoring alternatives
Again, not at all exclusive to drug reps. This behavior can be traced all the way back to Phase I of the clinical trial.
Your position in this thread makes no sense. I stated the drug reps help doctors stay up to date on the latest drugs and treatments, you disagreed and said doctors should "study. continuously." What should they study? Articles sponsored by the drug companies. How can you square that? Further, I'm sure you're aware that only a tiny percentage of doctors actually read the fancy journals and fewer understand the statistics and the details (perhaps those are the docs who sit around on the message boards you mention). For the other 90+%, the drug reps are the conduit who deliver relevant info to doctors. Ate they aggressive? Yes. Sneaky? Sometimes. Ultimately, do they help doctors discover drugs that help their patients? Unless you believe the drugs being approved by the FDA are ineffective, the answer is yes.
I thought we were talking about direct marketing by pharmaceutical company representatives by the way. It is of course impossible to separate modern medicine from the pharmaceutical industry since many therapies depend directly on them. It's still the doctor's job to figure out which medicines are actually good and what's merely some salesman's product.