Posted by Coturnix on October 31, 2006 Check out the freshly unvailed Open Healthcare Manifesto, designed to foster “open media” in healthcare and medicine and to implement “some sort of a new “integrity standard” … needed to help people sort through the junk that openness unfortunately tends to generate.”
To see the details, download the HealthTrain – the Open Healthcare Manifesto (pdf) and the HealthTrain Press Release (pdf)
Somebody is confusing openness with absence of review, which tells me they didn’t bother with much background reading. Then I look at the list of “supporters” and see an awful lot of financial interests (consultants, “data providers”, and so on). Then I read the first recent post whose title caught my eye, and I find a tired old “banning Pharma schwag is pointless” whine.
I smell the healthcare equivalent of a greenwash.
Comment unrelated to post, but: clock genes and sleep stuff! I didn’t get to write all the science that I wanted because it was too much genetics and molecular stuff for people to want to read, so the printed article is short and simple and only a sliver of the original piece I submitted, but I put some of the edited-out bits on my blog.
Bill,
You are mistaken about “confusing openness with absence of review” and I suggest you actually read the Manifesto.
The principles are clear about the need for disclosure, review and balance. Also they are honest and realistic about the fact that no matter what you do, financial interests and incentives will never go away and just have to be managed and disclosed properly.
Expecting for blanket bans to have an actual effect, beside a good show, is simply naive. But of course those shielded in ivory towers do not have to bother acknowledging this.
October 31, 2006
October 31, 2006
November 7, 2006