The Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education will publish a list of continuing medical education courses and companies that have violated its commercial bias standards, reports the New York Times. The accrediting group, which is supported by the type of for-profit companies that provide more than half of all CME courses for U.S. physicians, has been accused of being slow to act on investigations of industry bias, and generally reluctant to take the proactive stances on commercial bias that other professional groups have adopted over the last several years.
The Times points to the ACCME's investigation of a CME program on atypical antipsychotics that was held up by psychiatrist Dr. Bernard Carroll on his blog, Health Care Renewal. Though the ACCME eventually concurred and the program was pulled from the web, CME watchdog Dr. Daniel Carlat has the slides over at Carlat Psychiatry Blog.
His take? This is biased, but I've seen worse. Carlat writes:
My point being that if the Atypical Antipsychotic program is bad enough to be pulled for commercial, my conservative estimate is that at least half, probably more, of all industry funded psychiatry CME will also need the retraction treatment. The problem is, who on earth has the time to police these things?... The best and simplest solution would be to end industry funding of medical education altogether.
Check out more PostScript coverage of CME and industry influence.
--Kate Petersen, PostScript blogger