Our friends from Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry: A Closer Look have an excellent post discussing how physicians’ “continuing education” classes are often thinly-veiled advertising for new medical treatments and the companies that develop them. The blog provides a case study of a CME course that is really just an infomercial for a medical equipment maker called Neuronetics. The blog concludes:
How does advertising such as this, which masquerades as science, help to educate physicians? Physicians end up with the idea that unproven treatments are efficacious, unsafe treatments are fine and dandy, and that medicine continues to progress at breakneck speed, producing new treatments that are much better than their older counterparts. And this helps patients… HOW?
That’s a very good question. Read the full post here.
