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What if the doctors teaching you, the researchers testing new drugs, and the journals you trust were all being paid by the same companies that sell those drugs? Arnold Relman, who edited the New England Journal of Medicine for 14 years, believed that is exactly what was happening. In 1980 he warned about a new “medical-industrial complex”—a growing web of for-profit hospitals, labs, and companies that treat health care like a business instead of a service for sick people. Over time he became especially worried about the pharmaceutical industry’s influence. Relman said the drug companies were buying the medical profession. They paid for research, sponsored medical education classes, and funded the experts who wrote articles and guidelines. Academic medical centers and universities, he argued, were letting themselves become “paid agents” of the industry. In his view, this was disgraceful because doctors and scientists are supposed to put patients first, not company profits. He saw the problem in continuing medical education, where drug companies helped pay for the courses doctors must take to keep their licenses. He argued that education should be free of marketing pressure so doctors learn what is best for patients, not what sells the most pills. As editor, he made the New England Journal one of the first to require authors to disclose any money they received from companies whose products they wrote about. Relman thought the solution was bigger than better rules. He believed medicine should be non-profit, with doctors paid a salary instead of fees for every test or procedure, and with a simpler payment system that does not reward unnecessary care. He kept sounding the alarm for decades, saying the commercial side of medicine had grown even worse than he first predicted.