Friday, October 29, 2010

From Health Care Renewal: Commercial, and Dangerous, CME

Over on our friends the Health Care Renewal blog, Bernard Carroll posted this important message:
http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2010/10/thats-education.html

Dr. Carroll looks in detail at a single commercial CME offering in psychiatry, an apparently innocent (even if hardly earthshattering) chat between two prominent academic psychiatrists on mood disorders. He shows, first, how this program that is ostensibly about the physician-patient relationship manages to get in a number of "soft" messages promoting the drugs made by the two sponsoring firms. Second, and probably more important, he noted a slide that gives incorrect and indeed dangerous information about a set of little-used antidepressants (MAO inhibitors). This dangerous and incorrect content is contained in a program that features two academically highly-qualified psychiatrists and that is officially spopnsored by the Purdue College of Pharmacy. In short, the internal quality control within this medical "education" enterprise seems to be about the same as the quality control in GlaxoSmithKline's Puerto Rican manufacturing plant (latest post).

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