We often hear about interactive videoconferencing being used to train docs through live surgery broadcasts, but here’s another way it’s being used: Medical Missions’ Giggles Theater Brings Laughter to Critically Ill Children Through Polycom Interactive Video.

Through the use of Polycom’s videoconferencing equipment, the Giggles Theater regularly sponsors live, interactive video field trips that allow children and their families to “visit” such places as the Cincinnati Zoo, NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Since the beginning of this program, children have been able to swim with sharks in Florida, visit elephants in Tennessee, and build butterfly marionettes with the Center for Puppetry Arts in Georgia. Upcoming tours include a visit to the Missouri Discovery Center and the Manhattan School of Music.

What a great idea.

According to the New York Times, it’s plastic surgery for the rear end.

After decades spent developing and refining treatments for the breasts, a few American plastic surgeons are beginning to focus on procedures for the buttocks. Dr. Mendieta is among those who have become experts in enlarging women’s posteriors with solid silicone implants or injections of fat. And at medical meetings in the last two years, these doctors have taught the techniques to nearly 400 of their colleagues.

Um, no thanks.

While many in the U.S. have been protesting the idea of a United Arab Emirate-owned company managing some U.S. ports, Harvard has has been working with Dubai to open a state-of-the-art, 350,000-square-foot medical complex, according to the Harvard Crimson. From the article:

The Harvard Medical School Dubai Center (HMSDC), expected to be completed in mid-2007, will house post-doctoral education and research facilities that will turn newly graduated doctors into specialists, according to Amanda Pullen, a vice president at HMI.



The HMSDC will include the Maktoum-Harvard Library, financed by a $13.6 million gift from Dubai Crown Prince and United Arab Emirates Defence Minister His Royal Highness General Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.




Pullen said yesterday that the center, which will be located in Dubai‘s Healthcare City neighborhood and affiliated with regional healthcare systems, would be the “biggest and most comprehensive” facility of its kind in the region.




“There are really no post-graduate training institutes like this anywhere [in the region],” Pullen said. “There is no organized sense of continuing medical education.”

Recommended reading from Anne Taylor-Vaisey: Here’s another one in the unending saga…

Paediatr Respir Rev. 2006 Mar;7(1):54-9: The relationship between paediatricians and commerce:

The interaction between doctors and commerce, particularly the pharmaceutical industry, has recently been subject to increasing scrutiny. Doctors are now exposed to mounting influence from industry as it spends large amounts of money on marketing, is heavily involved with continuing medical education and sponsors a major proportion of research. Conflicts of interest may exist on both sides of the relationship: doctors can be manipulated and companies need to be profitable. Paediatricians are just as open to this influence as are other members of the medical profession. There is evidence that clinical practice is altered by interaction with industry, although doctors appear to deny the likelihood of being influenced. There are significant concerns over the increasing involvement of the pharmaceutical industry with research, although the regulation of the industry continues to be strengthened and the process of research is becoming more transparent. Disclosure of conflicts of interest involving authorship is now common practice and should extend to all facets of the relationship. However, collaboration continues to be necessary in order to develop new therapies, maximise research and particularly in paediatrics, to test medications in children. Paediatricians need to be aware of the sources of influence and understand current guidelines so that interactions with industry continue to be appropriate.

From an AP story: Industry-funded research disputes grow:

Dr. Aubrey Blumsohn was stunned: Research results were submitted to a scientific meeting under his name, yet the British bone specialist insists he not only hadn’t written or reviewed the report, he wasn’t sure it was accurate.



The incident turned into a public feud when Blumsohn charged that the U.S. drug company paying for the study rebuffed his attempts to analyze the data.




It’s the latest in a string of controversies about pharmaceutical industry control of medical research, from hidden antidepressant risks to the undercounting of heart attacks in a critical study of the painkiller Vioxx.




Whoever pays for medical research - not necessarily the scientists who do the work - controls what doctors, and the public, learn about its outcome. Scientific journals, including one that published some of the reports Blumsohn now questions, are grappling anew with how to ensure that they print complete results.

I just felt sick to my stomach at some of the things I learned while researching this article for Medical Meetings and how all this could impact CME. I’m sure it doesn’t happen often, but these are the folks making headlines, and all the good work done by honest researchers, backed by companies that really want to improve the public health as well as make a buck goes for naught.

Envisioning 2.0 has an interesting interview about race-based medicine with Sally Guttmacher, professor and director of the Masters Program in Public Health at New York University. Is this a direction CME is going in? I’d say, given the fact that New Jersey recently mandated cultural competency CME, joining California in demanding physician education in this area.

Recommended reading from Anne Taylor-Vaisey: From today’s Ottawa Citizen:

Medical journal fires editor who alleged censorship: Dispute involves story on morning-after pill, prying pharmacists, by Sharon Kirkey

The editor of Canada’s top medical journal has been fired six weeks after accusing the journal’s owners of censoring a story.



Dr. John Hoey, a 10-year editor of the Ottawa-based Canadian Medical Association Journal, as well as deputy editor Anne Marie Todkill, were fired Monday afternoon after a dispute over the story about women seeking the “morning after” pill being questioned by pharmacists about their sex lives.




Dr. Donald Redelmeier, a member of the journal’s editorial board and a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, said the dismissals were conducted “in a manner that was unexpected and unexplained.”

According to USA Today, nine states—including my home state of Massachusetts—are considering legislation that would require closer scrutiny of all pharma gifts to physicians. Massachusetts is taking it a step further, with a proposal to ban all gifts to medical professionals. From the article:

State Sen. George Maziarz, R-N.Y., sponsored a bill to require such reporting after working in an office complex that also housed several doctors.



“They would show me their gifts: watches, leather jackets, golfing trips,” he says. “Someone is paying for that.”




Four states — Vermont, Minnesota, West Virginia and Maine — and the District of Columbia have laws requiring gift reporting by drugmakers.




California requires that drugmakers declare they are compliant with federal and industry gift guidelines.




“Within a year or two, we may have 20 or 25 states with these restrictions,” says Ron Buzzeo, chief regulatory officer at Dendrite International, which advises the pharmaceutical industry and has developed a way firms can track state regulations and requirements.

OK, but who’s regulating the regulators?

(Thanks to Pharma Gossip for the pointer.)

Homeland Defense Journal’s Medical Aspects of Disaster Management Conference sounds like a good one for CME professionals to attend. According to a press release,

The conference will bring together leading experts in the field of medical planning and consequence management in order to help Federal, state, local and private stakeholders become better informed, and ultimately help shape their organization’s role in the medical consequence management mission. Speakers will focus on the areas of Medical Management in the areas of: Pandemic Disease Response, Mass Casualty Event, Biological Casualties, Chemical Casualties, and Radiological/Nuclear Casualties.

It is scheduled to be held at the Sheraton National in Arlington, Va., on March 29 to 30, 2006.

A while back, the British Medical Journal explored the idea of disease mongering and CME’s potential place in it (i.e., Did GlaxoSmithKline “invent” irritable bowel syndrome in part by underwriting CME on the subject?). The idea must have been gathering steam over the past few years, because a new conference on the topic is being launched in Australia in April: the inaugural Conference on Disease-Mongering, to be held in Newcastle New South Wales, Australia on April 11th to 13th 2006. It’s unclear whether or not it will explore any CME-related topics.

(Thanks to Health Care Renewal for the pointer.)

Update: From BMJ: Selling sickness: the pharmaceutical industry and disease mongering. Commentary: Medicalisation of risk factors. Moynihan, R., Heath, I., Henry, D., Gotzsche, P. C

BMJ 2002 324: p. 886-891