Jama lays an egg

JAMA LAYS AN EGG Three months ago I took JAMA to task over a Viewpoint opinion piece about conflict of interest. The authors proposed dancing around the reality of financial conflict of interest in medicine by talking instead about confluence of interest. I countered with a proposal for the term competing interests, which would not paper over the problem. In that postI also included a letter I had sent to JAMA in response to the opinion piece, but which JAMA had declined to publish. I questioned whether JAMA had deep sixed all the critical replies it received.Now I can report that, in the April 26, 2016 print edition, JAMA has finally published one critical letter and a replyfrom the original authors. So JAMA didn’t deep six everything. This new correspondence appears 174 days after print publication and 214 days after on-line publication of the original Viewpoint article. That glacial delay is problematic – it disables meaningful dialogue.The new critical letter is from a group in Europe, and it thoughtfully discusses weaknesses in the Viewpoint authored by Cappola and FitzGerald. These Viewpoint authors did not do justice to the critical letter in their reply. Moreover, they disclosed multiple potential competing interests, but they did not follow their own advice by clarifying why we should disregard those obvious competing interests. As we all know, the mere disclosure of competing interests does not by itself remove the problem. It can be a device for hiding in ...
Source: Health Care Renewal - Category: Health Management Tags: Anne Cappola Bernard Carroll competing interest conflict of interest Garret FitzGerald JAMA Source Type: blogs