Jama jumps the shark

JAMA JUMPS THE SHARKMedical journals are supposed to promote professional values – scientific, social, and ethical. Quality matters, in each of these domains. Lately, however, highly ranked journals are failing in respect of ethics commentaries. Some editors seem happy to publicize or even to co-author commentaries that are dismissive of current ethics initiatives – like transparency of data reporting and disclosure of conflicts of interest (COI). That’s one way for journals to jump the shark in the race for ratings. They surely get attention and applause in some quarters – but those stunts are net negatives for the journals. Here is one example.Last fall, JAMA went splashy with a sappy Viewpoint articleon conflict of interest by Anne R. Cappola and Garret A. FitzGerald. Anne Cappola is also an associate editor of JAMA– what a coincidence! The article was a Pollyanna piece by these two professors at Penn, promoting pushback on perceived pharmascolds, but really just papering over the problem of COI. The sappy formula? They declared conflict of interest to be a pejorative term that should be replaced by confluence of interest. This casuistry was backed up by wishful thinking and hortatory hand waving, weakly argued. Mostly, it gave the impression that the authors, presuming to speak for investigators generally, were offended by the increasing regulations for managing COI. Those developments have occurred at the Federal, institutional, and publication levels. Worse, t...
Source: Health Care Renewal - Category: Health Management Tags: Anne Cappola Bernard Carroll conflict of interest conflict of interest blog confluence of interest Garret FitzGerald JAMA Source Type: blogs