Op-Ed portrays CME as crooked enterprise
That’s because, while ACCME guidelines prevent drug firms from paying educational speakers directly, a “loophole” allows firms to hire for-profit medical education and communication companies (MECCs) to organize the courses, noted Daniel Carlat, a practicing psychiatrist and editor-in-chief of The Carlat Psychiatry Report, a sometimes irreverent monthly newsletter which Carlat says offers unbiased information on psychiatric practice.
MECCs get paid by pharma to create course work and pay doctors to deliver it, but the content is “rarely” developed by the identified experts, he argued. Instead, it is developed by the MECC.
Carlat's solution: limit drug firms to sponsoring promotional, non-accredited education. That is the best way to prevent situations like the one in which GlaxoSmithKline paid for CME courses that emphasized the benefits of diabetes drug Avandia over other drugs while downplaying Avandia’s cardiovascular risks, he stated.
Carlat
is not the first to wage this argument. A 2006 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association,
exploring the “widespread influence” drug firms have over medical education, cited
the provider-grantor relationship as a conflict of interest and said manufacturers
should not be permitted to provide CME support “directly or indirectly.”