CME as an ego-boost?

This article from the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery is pretty interesting. It presents results from an outcomes investigation that was performed to compare physicians'

performance and attitude in a procedure-related CME activity.

The kicker is that while they found a correlation between increased confidence and

improved performance, but there was an even greater correlation between

increased confidence and their personal perception of improvement. As an alert reader who gave me a heads up on this article said in an e-mail, "A skeptic

might observe that, while CME improves doctors' performance, it also makes them

develop a false sense of confidence." (Thanks, Irwin!)