Pharma giant Pfizer announced today that it will be funding a Stanford University-led initiative to provide industry continuing medical eduction (CME) which will not depend upon direct corporate “influence” on the curriculum. Sounds pretty ironic, at best, and downright insidious at worst. According to Stanford , there is room for the unbound dissemination of medical didactic method free of corporate influence while allowing Pharma industry financing.

“We believe that the education of practicing physicians should be based solely on the best scientific evidence presented in a fair and balanced way,” said Jackler, professor and chair of otolaryngology. “Unfortunately what’s happened is that the partnership with industry has led CME astray, to the point where the curricula are too often biased toward business interests.

“So we set out to see if industry would be willing to partner with us to create a high-quality curriculum, under the condition that Stanford faculty would choose the topics and design the curriculum independent of the relationship with industry,” he added. “We sought not to prevent partnerships with industry, but rather to redefine it.”

Redefinition. I guess it’s all in the semantics. | LINK

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