Conflicts of interest in medicine: a never-ending story

Abstract

Individuals may have conflicts of interest (CoI) when they choose between the duties of their jobs and their own private interests. In medicine, CoI are potentially ubiquitous and their disclosure has now become the most frequent strategy to address them in professional lives. In the medical literature, CoI are classified into two different types—financial and non-financial. Financial CoI are easy to identify and can bias any kind of results in research; so, their disclosure is very important. The unsolvable dilemma is where to set the lowest limit for sums received from industry. Non-financial CoI are a very large category intrinsically related to the individuals concerned, ranging from family relationships to religious beliefs, and the mere disclosure of many of them can raise privacy and ethical issues. Two opposite narratives characterize the debate on financial CoI caused by pharmaceutical industry. The critical side argues that, because the primary goal of pharmaceutical industry is inevitably to promote its products, the best strategy is to stay away from financial CoI. On the other hand, the defensive side claims that financial CoI are boosted by ideology but meaningless in real practice, since any kind of interest can raise a potential conflict. A missing point in the debate on financial CoI is that health care is a classical example of ‘market failure’ in the economic theory. Since health cannot be considered a ‘consumer good’, the economic paradigm of ‘free market’ does not fit for healthcare products. To conclude, even though transparency on financial CoI cannot itself deter the risk of bias, rejecting it would be an even bigger mistake. At variance, mandatory disclosure of non-financial CoI risks to be confusing and questionable in many cases, paradoxically distracting attention from the potential bias created by financial CoI.