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General News    H3'ed 11/1/09

Aren't You Glad Your Doctor Completed Pharma's CMEs?

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Martha Rosenberg
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Raise your hand if you've breathed a sign of relief seeing your doctor had a CME certificate next to the medical school diploma on the wall.

Did your doctor pass , Bipolar Disorder: Individualizing Treatment to Improve Patient Outcomes, Part 2 "taught" by Trisha Suppes, MD, PhD and offered by CME Outfitters?

Suppes is a Professor in Stanford's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science and funded by Abbott, AstraZeneca; GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen, Novartis, Pfizer, Wyeth, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Shire and four more pharma companies.

Maybe your doctor passed Quadrivalent HPV Vaccine May Be Effective in Women 24 to 45 Years Old --which sounds like a sales pitch for Gardasil because it is--which "studies" a Lancet article written by Nubia Munoz, MD, two Merck employees and other authors.

Sample question: "What was the main conclusion of the current study by Munoz and colleagues of HPV vaccine among women between the ages of 24 and 45 years?" (Italics CME's) Hint: the answer is in the title.

Upon "completion on this activity" offered by CME giant Medscape--still available for credit if you hurry--"participants will be able to: "Specify the currently recommended age range for the administration of the quadrivalent human papillomavirus vaccine" and "Describe the effects of the quadrivalent human papillomavirus vaccine among women between the ages of 24 and 45 years."

CMEs, continuing medical education courses, are sponsored by pharma, "taught" by pharma funded specialists and bracketed by pop-up drugs ads which sometimes occlude the text you're reading. ("Which of the following manic symptoms are most seriously impacting your bipolar patients' lives?" asked a disease-baiting ad for Geodon, direct-to-consumer style, when we looked at a CME.) Yet doctors are required to sit through the canned message like a time-share presentation and answer a quiz just to keep their state licenses and sometimes insurance policies.

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Martha Rosenberg is an award-winning investigative public health reporter who covers the food, drug and gun industries. Her first book, Born With A Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp The Public Health, is distributed by (more...)
 

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