This post courtesy of Anne Taylor-Vaisey:

The following editorial was published in the September 2004 issue of the Journal of Family Practice:

Susman JL. Commercial sponsorship of CME: There are alternatives. September 2004;53(9):676-677.

Excerpt: Pharmaceutical corporations providing illegal inducements to physicians to use their medications inappropriately off-label. National Institutes of Health researchers securing lucrative consulting contracts, inciting congressional furor. Journals publishing biased articles sponsored by proprietary entities. These headlines have underscored the challenges of commercial sponsorship in medicine.

New, tighter rules for commercial support of continuing medical education (CME) have been promulgated by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), but their effectiveness in safeguarding the public trust continues to engender debate. Many esteemed educators suggest that any commercial role in academe promotes subtle if not outright bias. They say objectivity and fair balance are impossible when a proprietary entity is involved, even at arm s length. Authors or speakers may present data incompletely (if at all), frame data in a biased fashion, or inadequately consider competing interventions. Because studies are open to interpretation, primary data may be difficult to access, and reviews may therefore be limited. Uncovering such bias is often difficult.

PubMed link

Full text

This post courtesy of Anne Taylor-Vaisey:

Medical Education October 2004;38(10)

The above issue is now available online from Blackwell Synergy. The table of contents for this issue is listed below. Click here for links to the abstracts and full text.

1019 in this issue

As this article in the Indy Star makes clear, televised surgery used to educate a meeting s attendees on a specific technique is not without risks.

Hundreds of doctors watched on live video as Italian surgeons replaced a man’s heart valve without cutting open his chest. Then something went wrong.



The valve was in place, but his heart was failing as the live telecast to Washington ended. Two hours later, the 77-year-old died in a Milan hospital.




The surgery, telecast to doctors gathered here for an international meeting, was not the first associated with this cutting-edge experiment& But it illustrates the hazards of broadcasting straight from the operating room, a popular way of teaching new techniques to doctors at medical meetings.

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Post compliments of Anne Taylor-Vaisey:

Publication bias resulting from the publishing of only positive results of trials has been well documented, and has resulted in the recent publication of the following statement in the major medical journals:

Clinical trial registration: a statement from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors [ICMJE]. CMAJ 2004 Sep 14;171(6):606-7.

Full text

The ICMJE member journals will require, as a condition of consideration for publication, registration in a public trials registry. Trials must register at or before the onset of patient enrollment. This policy applies to any clinical trial starting enrollment after July 1, 2005. For trials that began enrollment before ! this date, the ICMJE member journals will require registration by Sept. 13, 2005, before considering the trial for publication.

I hesitated to read Steve Passin’s column in the latest issue of Medical Meetings on implementing the new Standards of Commercial Support, since it was written well before ACCME released them this week, along with documents explaining what the organization would and would not accept as resolutions for conflicts of interest.

But I read it, and he did a great job of explaining the steps to take–even without seeing the supporting documents. It’s good advice for any ACCME-accredited provider who’s pondering putting the new Standards into effect.

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