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Ditch the opening ceremony and name(less) tags,
and publicly disclose potential conflict of interest
Every year, numerous national and regional obstetrics and gynecology
(OB/GYN) meetings are held in China. While these meetings
provide ample opportunities for scholarly communication and the
assimilation of new diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, several
troubling oddities of these meetings are at direct odds with international
norms and seriously underminethe very purposes of these
meetings.
First and foremost, an elaborate, sometimes excruciatingly long,
opening ceremony, featuring touchy-feely speeches given by a slew
of government officials and dignitaries in descending pecking order,
is now a fixture of all meetings. The seemingly incessant jabbering,
even a few minutes long, may feel like eternity to the hundreds of
participants coming to the meeting for scholarly purposes. The ceremony
is sometimes followed by orparalleled with group photos or,
more theatrically, evenautographs on a wall-sized billboard designated
specifically for very important persons (VIPs).
While these ceremonies couldprovide the VIPs an intoxicating
sense of self-importance and,quite often, handsome fees, they
add no value at all to the meetings and in fact show awanton disregard
to the interest of each andevery participant who paid his/her
registration fee. At the very least, they are inefficient: the meeting
could be a feat or bummer withor without these speakers’ blessing.
The second oddity is the nametags (or, more appropriately, nameless
tags) worn by meeting participants, which frequently display no
name at all and are simply onlytwo kinds: Delegate (participant) and
Distinguished Guest (or in somecases simply “VIP”).
One major function of all professional meetings is to provide a
forum to facilitate the exchange of views and ideas among meeting
participants. But this can bebest accomplished when two sides of
the communication are equal. The name(less) tags are a de-facto status
symbol, artificially and literally generating an inequality in status
and making genuine scientific exchange difficult, if not impossible.
Lastly, when industry-sponsored seminars sprinkled in meetings
are now common, few, if any, speakers at these seminars in the Chinese
OB/GYN meetings publicly declare any potential conflicts of interest,
even though they are paid handsomely by the sponsor to
speak on the topic that isrelated with the products that his/her
sponsor make. Some even becomea hired gun, blatantly promoting
the product(s) at the seminar to the unsuspecting audience. This is
essentially a misuse of thespeaker’s scholarly reputation for his/
her financial gains, and is entirely and egregiously unethical.
As of now, virtually alldiagnostic and therapeutic procedures
and drugs in OB/GYN that havebeen proven to be effective are first
invented or discovered in the West. Even numerous guidelines used
in the practice are written byour Western peers. As the most populous
country and now the second largest economic entity and the
producer of scientific papers in the world, China has the responsibility
to help to advance the OB/GYN field. However, the oddities
now prevailing in the OB/GYN professional meetings effectively
hinder the advancement of the field and should be reformed. Meetings,
big or small, can be perfectly fine without any opening ceremony
as our Western colleagues have shown. In fact, it would be
more efficient time-wise if no opening speech is given by government
officials. Name tags showing the bearer’s name and affiliation
should help to facilitate freeand effective exchange of scientific
ideas and views. Public disclosure of potential conflicts of interest
before lectures in general and specifically in industry-sponsored
seminars should provide the audience with awareness necessary
to judge the value of the lecture content.
This is particularly urgent since as of now many OB/GYN meetings
in China are faced with increasingly dwindling participants
(who pay the registration fee out of their own pocket) and some national
meetings now increasingly resort to the quota system
(assigning certain number of participants for specific institutions).
In fact, the registration fees of most, if not all, participants are
now shouldered by industry. Aside from the quality, the oddities
eluded above may also be responsible for this unenviable situation.
While the alignment with prevailing international norms of professional
meetings will not make China a leader in OB/GYN overnight,
it should help eliminate the elitism underlying these
oddities, foster a healthy cultureof scientific meetings, provide an
environment that is conducive to free exchange of scientific views
and ideas, and prepare young physicians to attune to international
norms. Consequently, it is timeto ditch the opening ceremony and
nameless tags, and publicly disclose potential conflicts of interest in
all OB/GYN meetings in China. And the time is now.
(本文作为 Letter to Editor发表在Gynecology and Minimally Invasive Therapy 2016年第1期上。
http://www.e-gmit.com/article/S2213-3070(15)00172-0/pdf)
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