Medical Education May 2006; 40 (5)

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The May 2006 issue has just been published online; full text by subscription. Some sample article titles:

Getting the measure of interprofessional learning

Thinking outside the (tick) box: rescuing professionalism and professional judgement
Making sense of qualitative data analysis: an introduction with illustrations from DIPEx (personal experiences of health and illness)

Validating the Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale (RIPLS) in the postgraduate context: are health care professionals ready for IPL?

Surgeons' participation in continuing medical education: is it evidence-based?

The use of standardised patients to assess clinical competence: does practice make perfect?

A peer-reviewed collection of reports on innovative approaches to medical education

Read the full table of contents for May. 

Free issue: January 2006    View all issues

Financial ties between DSM-IV [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders] panel members and the pharmaceutical industry

Late last week this study about DSM-IV panel members’ ties to drug companies received a lot of press. Go to Google News , type in cosgrove dsm-iv and you will find a number of news stories. The actual study was just published in the April 2006 issue of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics:

Cosgrove L, Krimsky S, Vijayaraghavan M, Schneider L. Financial ties between DSM-IV [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders] panel members and the pharmaceutical industry. Psychother Psychosom 2006;75:154-160.

Background: Increasing attention has been given to the transparency of potential conflicts of interest in clinical medicine and biomedical sciences, particularly in journal publishing and science advisory panels. The authors examined the degree and type of financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry of panel members responsible for revisions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders(DSM).
Methods: By using multimodal screening techniques the authors investigated the financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry of 170 panel members who contributed to the diagnostic criteria produced for the DSM-IV and the DSM-IV-TR.
Results: Of the 170 DSM panel members 95 (56%) had one or more financial associations with companies in the pharmaceutical industry. One hundred percent of the members of the panels on 'Mood Disorders' and 'Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders' had financial ties to drug companies. The leading categories of financial interest held by panel members were research funding (42%), consultancies (22%) and speakers bureau (16%).
Conclusions: Our inquiry into the relationships between DSM panel members and the pharmaceutical industry demonstrates that there are strong financial ties between the industry and those who are responsible for developing and modifying the diagnostic criteria for mental illness. The connections are especially strong in those diagnostic areas where drugs are the first line of treatment for mental disorders. Full disclosure by DSM panel members of their financial relationships with for-profit entities that manufacture drugs used in the treatment of mental illness is recommended.
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