Medical textbook authors received £11m in undisclosed payments from drug and device makers

Medical textbooks widely used by students and young doctors are riddled with undeclared conflicts of interest, a study has found.

While virtually every leading medical journal now requires authors to declare any potential conflicts of interest, the same rules do not apply to textbooks widely used in the US, says a team from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, in findings published in AJOB Empirical Bioethics.1

The most striking example is Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, now in its 20th edition. By searching a database of payments made to US doctors by …