New Editorial Policy on Conflicts of Interest

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Abstract
I was amazed to read about the change in requirements for prospective authors,* especially in regard to the prerequisite that they not have any financial ties with manufacturers that either make a product or compete with a product being reviewed in the article. The implications of such a change in policy are very disturbing indeed. I am not a researcher. I will never be asked to write a review article or editorial, nor do I have any friends, relatives, or acquaintances who are likely to find their names in print in such rarefied circles, but I still find myself disappointed with the cynical implications of your policy change, which are staggering: not only are the best and the brightest to be considered unable to maintain honest objectivity when faced with the seduction of money, but the editors of your publication, the peer-review committee that reviews the articles before publication, and the readers of the Journal, it would seem, are all incapable of controlling or even recognizing biased writing when they see it. As a result of such a policy, if the brightest person in a given area, the finest teacher on a given topic, has ever received so much as an honorarium from a drug company to deliver a lecture, that person would forever be barred from writing an educational review for the Journal, leaving the rest of us to be educated only by those mediocre enough not to have been chosen (by a manufacturer) as the most knowledgeable speaker on a given subject. This would represent a sad promotion of mediocrity in print.

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