Reasons to be cautious about competing interests

I agree that disclosure on its own is not an adequate response to competing interests.1 There has to be a point at which the competing interest is so extreme that the person has to be ruled out of the article, review, decision, or whatever the activity. But defining that point is notoriously hard.

The subheading of the editorial says “zero tolerance,” but it cannot really mean zero tolerance because that would rule out any author who had been given a pen, a pad, or lunch by a company. …