InFocus has a winner for its “What not to present” contest, and boy is it a doozy!

As Gizmodo says, “Do those boxes even say anything, or is this just some sort of psychological experiment?”

I know it’s not CME-related, but I could swear I’ve seen this one at several Alliance for CME sessions:

But this one, ah, this one I find strangely compelling, if totally nonsensical:

May your weird assets be on an upward trend! (More blindingly awful ppts here.) This was cross-posted on face2face.

It’s mid-May, so it must be time for the latest American Medical Association Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs report on financial relationships between industry and CME. I’ll leave it to others to weigh in on it at this point (here’s Tom Sullivan’s take) because, quite frankly, I’m getting a little tired of writing about it.

Want some background?

CEJA Report Sent Back Again

CEJA Releases Fourth Funding Report

AMA Again Rejects CEJA Report

CEJA Report Recommedations: Rejected Again

CEJA Report Misses the Mark

CEJA Report: Close, but No Cigar

Etc., etc., etc. Hopefully this time around it won’t be another remake of Groundhog Day.

On a semi-related note, I read an article in The Boston Globe over the weekend that I found both interesting and kind of troubling, seeing as the CME world relies so heavily on disclosure and transparency to manage conflicts of interests. Called Deeply Conflicted, it talks about some recent research that finds that “Coming clean about conflicts of interest … can promote less ethical behavior by advisers. And though most of us assume we’d cast a skeptical eye on advice from a doctor, stockbroker, or politician with a personal stake in our decision, disclosure about conflicts may actually lead us to make worse choices.” As is almost always the case with we humans, it’s more complicated than we’d like to think, though how disclosure works for CME does seem to be the best-case scenario for it being effective (handled by a third party, with discloser and disclosed-to being peers).

Here are two articles you might find interesting:

Doctors Loath to Pay for Unbiased Education: Survey, which tells about the not-so-shocking results of a survey asking docs whether they think commercial support can bias CME (88 percent said yes), and whether they would be willing to pay more to eliminate the need for commercial support (less than half said yes; only 15 percent were willing to get rid of commercial support completely). The study is published in Archives of Internal Medicine, May 9, 2011 (thanks once again to @cmeadvocate for the pointer.)

And ProPublica is at it again: Doctors’ groups welcome medical company dollars, which excoriates the Heart Rhythm society for having sponsors and exhibitors at its conference (as do probably 99 percent of conventions of all types, medical and otherwise). If the Society is doing something wrong, as the article implies, then the tradeshow model as we know it is unethical and needs to change, which I do not believe (though I do believe it likely will be changing in our lifetime for other reasons). Or is it only unethical for medical shows, and okay for everyone else? Seriously, someone explain why this is so heinous, because I don’t get it.