Hi
Cld I encourage as many people as possible to attend the following. Sunita comes with a very high recommendation from George Loewenstein.
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Friday, 9 July, 4.00-5.30pm
T206 (Lakatos Building, 2nd Floor)
Sunita Sah (Carnegie Mellon University)
Medical Conflicts of Interest: Physician Rationalization and Limits of Disclosure
Abstract. Conflicts of interest (COI) can often lead professionals to give biased advice. Despite expanding research on the prevalence and consequences of COI in medicine, little attention has been given to the psychological processes that enable physicians to rationalize the acceptance of gifts, and the impact of policies to manage such COI. The first paper focuses on the acceptance of COI by resident physicians, and investigates how their perception of hardships may contribute to accepting gifts from pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers that appear, to many critics, to be unethical. The second paper examines the effect of disclosure, which is one of the most commonly proposed and implemented remedies for dealing with COI. Physicians who disclose their self-interests to patients may unwittingly pressure patients to comply with their recommendations. This is because patients may feel more uncomfortable to turn down the doctor’s recommendation following disclosure for fear of signalling distrust to their doctor, and patients may also feel increased pressure to satisfy the doctor’s self interest. This pressure to comply may be decreased with external disclosure, given from a third party rather than from the advisor themselves. Overall, these findings help further our understanding of some of the factors that lead to greater acceptance of COI, as well as providing insights on the effects of disclosure policies to manage such conflicts.
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