Eli Lilly's "Pain TV": Are they serious?

Sometimes in the CME field you come across something that seems so embarrassing for everybody involved that you just have to shake your head and wonder what they were thinking. So here is the link to Medscape's ACCME Accredited Category 1 CME activity called "Pain TV", supported by an "unrestricted educational grant" from Eli Lilly, manufacturer of Cymbalta, which recently won the FDA indication for chronic musculoskeletal pain--in addition to its indications for depression, generalized anxiety disorder, diabetic neuropathic pain, and fibromylagia. According to Pharma Marketing Blog, each new indication means another $500 million in the bank for the company.

To ensure that it will gain its windfall, Lilly has teamed up with Medscape, several academics on speakers bureaus for multiple companies, and lord knows what other ancillary production and medical writing companies, to produce a lavish 12 part series called "Pain TV" in which they will "educate" doctors about how to diagnose lots of patients with chronic pain, and how important it is to treat it. Will they blatantly push Cymbalta as the very best treatment? Of course not, since that would reveal the promotional intent of this CME program. Instead, they will teach us about the horrors of pain, the dangers of opiates, and about a new non-addictive treatment with a recent FDA approval for the condition that Lilly is paying millions to educate doctors about.

Maybe Cymbalta is, indeed, a miracle drug for chronic pain. Maybe all pain patients would benefit enormously from it. I'm not a pain specialist, and therefore I am in no position to judge the relative advantages or disadvantages of Cymbalta for pain. I'm certain there are thousands of complicated studies in the medical literature that have some bearing on whether Cymbalta is the go-to medication for this condition--and I am also certain that reasonable doctors would disagree about the relative merits of these studies. Accredited CME is supposed to be a way for doctors to learn about best medical practices from unbiased and credible colleagues. Unfortunately, I'm assuming that doctors who are paid by Lilly (indirectly via Medscape in this case) will have an overwhelming financial incentive to emphasize the strengths of Cymbalta and the weaknesses of its competitors--which is the very definition of commercial bias. It doesn't mean that Pain TV isn't of some educational value--many promotional activities can be quite educational. Just don't pretend that it meets ACCME's criteria for accredited CME.

I am certain that this is not the kind of CME that the AMA's new ethics guideline condones: "For the most part, accepting support from a company or permitting participation by an individual when there is an irreducible financial interest would not be ethically acceptable."

But then again, maybe I'm misreading the intent of these guidelines. Perhaps the AMA would be all for a CME activity in which Lilly funds a 12 part TV show highlighting a disease state for which it happens to have a treatment all dressed up and raring to go.