A world without industry support

ACP Advocate Blog author Bob Doherty is reporting from ACP convention headquarters in Philadelphia. He’s pumped up about the annual meeting, Internal Medicine 2009. He writes:

Today and for the rest of the week, I will be blogging from the Philadelphia Convention Center, where ACP will be holding its annual scientific meeting. Convention center workers are now doing all of the prep work for a successful medical convention, including setting up the exhibit hall.

But this year the looming ban on industry support for CME brings new concerns. He goes on:

A premier scientific meeting like ACP's clearly services a public good (helping doctors keep up-to-date in their clinical knowledge and skills), and drug industry support, within strict guidelines, helps keep the meeting affordable. If industry support for CME was to be prohibited, I wonder where the money would come from to allow internists to continue to have access to CME at a price they can afford.

He’s probably wondering if this year’s premier internal medicine conference will be the last.

The moderate players in this debate would be content to bolster the existing safeguards and firewalls for industry supported CME and find a way to provide more resources of the ACCME so they can do a better job of evaluating content. The more likely scenario, unfortunately, is that the agitators will continue to demagogue this issue in the popular media until there’s nothing left of industry support.

H/T to DB’s Medical Rants.