UPDATE — Getting the facts gets harder: CEJA report off AMA website
The American Medical Association seems to have taken a report recommending the end of industry funding of Continuing Medical Education (CME) off its website. The recommendations, brought before the AMA’s Reference Committee on Amendments to Constitution and Bylaws by the Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs (CEJA) last year, were unambiguous:
“Individual physicians and institutions of medicine, such as medical schools, teaching hospitals, and professional organizations (including state and medical specialty societies) must not accept industry funding to support professional education activities. Exception should be made for technical training when new diagnostic or therapeutic devices and techniques are introduced. Once expertise in the use of previously new devices has developed within the professional community, continuing industry involvement in educating practitioners is no longer warranted.
They have been replaced by this two-page update – “Industry Support for Professional Education in Medicine-Update” — that urges CEJA “to more fully address potentially different implications for different stakeholders in medical education and to seek further input from stakeholders.” As reported earlier (see Carlat’s post), the Council has been assigned to work with Council on Medical Education to develop “complementary, companion reports,” and word is that industry funding will be OKed this time around.
Meanwhile, the AMA continues to defend the impartiality of industry-funded CME through an industry-backed task force it has housed for two decades. This Task Force on CME Provider/Industry Collaboration, whose annual conference was supported by Educational Measures, Medscape, Pfizer Inc., Pri-Med, Wyeth and a host of MECC exhibitors, is made up of “50 senior professionals from CME providers, grantor companies, and other industry organizations.” The task force has launched a campaign called “Get the Facts,” which seems aimed to reverse a growing sense in the profession that the independence of physician education is compromised by its overwhelming financial reliance on the pharmaceutical industry:
“The media, state and federal law and policy makers as well as regulators and other ‘collective/consensus opinions’ frequently use and disseminate information that can lead to incorrect assumptions and false perceptions about CME. This has led to increased regulatory scrutiny and critical public opinion regarding CME practices. Get involved! Help Get the Facts straight!”
UPDATE: We contacted the AMA and learned that the Get the Facts! Campaign was launched Oct. 22, 2008.
March 23rd, 2009 at 5:35 pm
With CME, who exactly determines what information is medically, ‘new’? A supplemental indication for a drug? A cardiac catheter that now is packaged in sets of two instead of one? The AMA needs a loophole just as statutes need amendments.
The AMA has persistently insisted on convincing the American public that national health care will result in health care absent of quality and availability for others to be treated. They have done campaigns and propaganda to convince the American public of this for a good part of the 20th century.
Now, what is the base for their conslusions regarding a national health program? Where is the merit? There possibly cannot be any validity to fictitious conclusions determined by the AMA because national health care has never occured here.
The AMA is a cult. They have stated that if one does not have a MD after their surname, than they are practicing medicine without a license. Really? Is the AMA so narrow-minded to believe that there possibly cannot be NPs, PAs, and DOs that are superior to MDs in many ways? It’s arrogant to hold such a premise as complete truth. The AMA, rather, does not want anyone else on their turf.
The AMAs alliance, or cronysm with the pharma industry is quite clear by the fact that the AMA sells licensing information of doctors to this industry, which makes the AMA between 30 and 40 million dollars a year. They discriminate pathologically about what quality health care is as it fits their interests.
Thank you for your informative post.