The poll suggests that people are especially wary of gifts that drug companies give to doctors: 64 percent think that the medical judgment of physicians can be swayed by these gifts.

Michael F. Jacobsen, CSPI executive director, called the gifts “a prescription for inferior medical care” and said that “the public’s perception suggests a crisis of confidence in the medical community.”

The poll’s message hovered in the background of CSPI’s July 11 meeting on “conflicted science,” where researchers, journalists and a handful of industry representatives came to debate whether corporate money in science does more harm than good.

Drummond Rennie, M.D., deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, was one of several speakers who concluded that complete separation of public and private funding for research is the only way to keep research free of corporate bias.

“Dependence on corporate money corrupts institutions, researchers and [doctors],” he said.

Researchers and journalists also squared off on the question of how much space the media should give to reporting the potential conflicts of interest among the researchers they cover. Nearly two-thirds of people polled by CSPI say that reporters should include information on whether university scientists quoted in their articles receive money from companies with a financial stake in the research.

New York Times science editor Cornelia Dean said that reporters do their best to include conflict-of-interest information when it appears relevant to the story, but that journalists risk cutting back on the newsworthy elements of a story if disclosure is made a standard rule for every article.

To read more about CSPI’s Integrity in Science program, go to http://cspinet.org/integrity/.