We all want to base our healthcare decisions on trustworthy evidence. Yet the landmark 2009 Institute of Medicine report identified widespread financial conflicts of interest across medical research, education, and practice. 1 It highlighted that extensive industry influence may be jeopardising "the integrity of scientific investigations, the objectivity of medical education, the quality of patient care, and the public's trust in medicine." 1 Problem of financial dependence Research Financial dependence on commercial companies is common within research, and in the United States almost 60% of medical research is industry funded. 9 It's been shown repeatedly that published outcomes of industry sponsored studies tend to favour sponsors' products, creating a "sponsorship bias" in the evidence base that overplays benefits and underplays harms. 10 In 2013, research by the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in
Expanding disease definitions are causing more and more previously healthy people to be labelled as diseased, contributing to the problem of overdiagnosis and related overtreatment. Often the specialist guideline panels which expand definitions have close tis to industry and do not investigate the harms of defining more people as sick. Responding to growing calls to address these problems, an international group of leading researchers and clinicians is proposing a new way to set diagnostic thresholds and mark the boundaries of condition definitions, to try to tackle a key driver of overdiagnosis and overtreatment. The group proposes new evidence-informed principles, with new process and new people constituting new multidisciplinary panels, free from financial conflicts of interest.
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