
JAMA Theme Issue Tackles Conflicts of Interest in Medicine
A new themed issue of JAMA delves into the complicated relationships and practices that can result in conflicts of interest for physicians, medical journals, schools, and other healthcare entities.
A new themed issue of JAMA delves into the complicated relationships and practices that can result in conflicts of interest (COIs) for physicians, medical journals, schools, and other healthcare entities.
The issue, which includes 23 viewpoint articles, 3 editorials, and 2 original investigations, is outlined and summarized in one of the editorials, aptly titled “
One of the original investigations garnering the most attention was the one that examined the relationship between physician prescribing and policies regulating pharmaceutical sales visits, called “detailing.”
Another study making headlines found that nearly half of all physicians in the United States
Some of the other topics discussed in the issue were:
- Teaching Medical Students About Conflicts of Interest. This viewpoint argued that future clinicians must be educated about what exactly constitutes a COI and taught skills to help them handle potentially sensitive situations.
- What Do Patients Think About Physicians’ Conflicts of Interest? This viewpoint called for more research onto whether disclosing physician COIs would meaningfully change patient behavior.
- Conflict of Interest and the Role of the Food Industry in Nutrition Research. This viewpoint cautioned that the food industry’s participation in funding nutrition research creates a multitude of opportunities for bias and skewed findings.
- Medical Journals, Publishers, and Conflict of Interest. This viewpoint encouraged journals to keep editorial and business decisions independent and separate so as to avoid potential COIs that could weaken credibility.
Overall, the viewpoints, editorials, and research articles in the issue emphasize how important it is for the medical field to preserve its integrity and trustworthiness by minimizing or avoiding COIs and potential bias. Specifically, Stead’s editorial noted that the viewpoints “suggest a systematic approach in which all stakeholders in the health professions and biomedical sciences work together to protect professional judgment and integrity while advancing progress.”
Among these stakeholders are medical professionals, who “should think critically about conscious and unconscious biases affecting their judgment and the limitations of information resources,” and researchers, who can “advance measurement of bias and incorporation of information about COIs and bias into context-relevant decision aids for physicians and patients.”
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