Continuing medical education: recovering its essential interest

Abstract

Continuous medical education (CME), defined as those educational activities that serve to maintain, develop, or increase the knowledge and skills a physician uses to provide services, serves a key part in the responsible practice of medicine. One of its main objectives is to maintain an up-to- date scientific knowledge, required for caring patients, that due to its exponential growth makes difficult to be achieved as an individual project. The fiduciary compromise of medicine with society and patients, sets their welfare as the primary interest of the profession, and obliges to critically assess the way CME is currently being organized and delivered. The available empirical information reveals that most part of current CME is organized, or financially supported, by the pharmaceutical and medical devices industry, and delivered by key opinion leaders supported and promoted by the same industry. This situation transforms most CME initiatives in plain marketing, aimed at increasing industrial revenue, and makes inevitable for the medical professionals and organizations to think how to rescue its primary interest, for the good of patients and society as a whole.