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I thank Dr Bennett for drawing the RCP guidelines to my attention.
Like other documents, they suggest standards for industry sponsored
meetings and hospitality and set out some broad principles about research.
In particular, they recommend that physicians should 'obtain written
agreement from the sponsoring biomedical company for the freedome to
publish results in journals of the physician's choice' and stress the
importance of acknowledging funding and declaring competing interests. My
only criticism of the guidelines is that the RCP charges for them, and
does not make them available on its website. I accept that the charge is
quite low (£5 -- although this does work out at £1.25 per page), but it
doesn't strike me as the best strategy for making sure the guidelines are
widely read and might help to account for why I didn't identify them in my
research for this article.
Competing interests:
I am the author of the original article
The Royal College of Physicians has a long-standing concern with
relationships between physicians and the bio-medical industry, and applaud
the BMJ's intention to make the debate more prominent.
We were sorry that Ms. Wager's useful article about available guidlines
had no mention of our recently up-dated document (Relationships between
physicians and the biomedical industry,Royal College of Physicians 2002,
price £5). We believe this is a practical piece of advice which
acknowledges the delicacy of the porcupine dance, and helps both parties
to avoid being hurt.
RCP Guidelines
I thank Dr Bennett for drawing the RCP guidelines to my attention.
Like other documents, they suggest standards for industry sponsored
meetings and hospitality and set out some broad principles about research.
In particular, they recommend that physicians should 'obtain written
agreement from the sponsoring biomedical company for the freedome to
publish results in journals of the physician's choice' and stress the
importance of acknowledging funding and declaring competing interests. My
only criticism of the guidelines is that the RCP charges for them, and
does not make them available on its website. I accept that the charge is
quite low (£5 -- although this does work out at £1.25 per page), but it
doesn't strike me as the best strategy for making sure the guidelines are
widely read and might help to account for why I didn't identify them in my
research for this article.
Competing interests:
I am the author of the original article
Competing interests: No competing interests