Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11734

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Publication type: news

AAMC Symposium Examines the Science Behind Conflicts of Interest
Association of American Medical Colleges 2007 Jun
http://www.aamc.org/research/coi/science.htm

Full text:

As part of its long-standing commitment to provide leadership to academic medicine on the thorny issues of financial conflicts of interest in research, education, and clinical practice, the AAMC held a Symposium on the Scientific Basis of Influence and Reciprocity on June 12, 2007. Experts from around the nation met to discuss the emerging neurobiological and psychosocial evidence demonstrating the effects of gifts, favors, and reciprocal relationships on human choices and behaviors.

Jointly sponsored by the AAMC and the Baylor College of Medicine Department of Neuroscience and its Computational Psychiatry Unit, the symposium provided a forum for review and discussion of the latest scientific research documenting the important role played by unconscious influences that affect behavior and may lead to unwitting conflicts of interest.

“The evidence provides a persuasive scientific basis for re-evaluating historic patterns of interaction between academic medicine and the pharmaceutical and device industries, including gifts, favors, and other marketing activity both explicit and implicit,” said David Korn, M.D., senior vice president of the AAMC’s Division of Biomedical and Health Science Research.

“The evidence suggests that self-interest has a tendency to bias independent judgment in unconscious ways,” Korn said.

Speakers were drawn from this rapidly expanding area of multidisciplinary scientific inquiry and included Michael Friedlander and Read Montague from Baylor College of Medicine; Dan Ariely from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; George Loewenstein from Carnegie Mellon University; and Max Bazerman from Harvard Business School. Among the findings reported was that disclosure of financial relationships with companies-an important tenet of conflicts of interest management-is not effective as a management tool.

The AAMC organized the symposium to provide a scientific foundation for the work of its Task Force on Industry Funding of Medical Education and the AAMC–AAU Advisory Committee on Financial Conflicts of Interest in Clinical Research. The task force was created to assist academic medicine to manage more effectively the challenges to evidence-based education and practice presented by favors, gifts, and the blurring of promotion and scientific objectivity that can occur in industry-supported educational programs. The task force plans to issue principles and recommendations that will assist institutions in fashioning their essential relationships with industry in more principled ways that are less susceptible to unconscious bias.

The proceedings of the symposium, which was funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, will be published as a monograph by the AAMC.