This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Reply to article  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Topic Collections  • Drug Therapy, Other  • Conflict of Interest  • Medical Education  • Medical Ethics  • Ophthalmology, Other  • Drug Therapy  • Alert me on articles by topic

Is It Ethical?

Arch Ophthalmol. 2004;122:771-773.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

We were asked to contribute to a debate: Should the medical profession accept industry funding for physician continuing medical education (CME)? If the goal of a debate is to win the argument, we are in the most enviable position, since there is only one side to this question. Continuing medical education is financed and will continue to be financed—and profoundly influenced—by industry financing, and the medical education community cannot prevent it.

Of course, the medical institutions can reject unrestricted educational grants (which, incidentally, are neither unrestricted nor grants), but CME would still be underwritten and undermined by industry funding. It should be obvious to anyone who reads the newspapers that industry influence has saturated every aspect of academic medicine—research, journals, and CME. Almost weekly, the popular press exposes industry's "undue influence" on medicine with headlines like "Tactic of Drug Makers Is Raising Questions About Use of Research,"¹ "Biotech Firms Bypass . . . [Full Text of this Article]

David P. Heaphy, PhD; Victor B. Marrow, PhD
Baltimore, Md

Corresponding author and reprints: Victor B. Marrow, PhD, Office of Funded Programs/CME, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Turner 20/720 Rutland Ave, Baltimore, MD 212105-2195 (e-mail: vmarrow@jhmi.edu).