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 Releases Fourth Funding Report
CEJA Report Recommedations: Rejected Again
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).
