The onslaught of overly restrictive conflict-of-interest policies threatens such progress and may have some very damaging consequences on medical technology innovation and graduate medical education, while failing to address the real problems facing the health care system.
Financial conflicts of interest should always be disclosed, and industry-sponsored infomercials masquerading as CME should not be allowed, but physician-industry relationships are generally productive and are essential to the process of discovery, development, and education in medicine.
Dr. David William Rattner is chief of the division of gastrointestinal and general surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, both in Boston. He is a former president of the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons. The comments presented here are drawn from his keynote Karl Storz lecture at the 2011 SAGES annual meeting. He disclosed financial relationships with Olympus and Transenterix-SAB.