Steve Joffe, MD, MPH, chief of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, said doctors "who write for sites like Medscape need to disclose all potentially relevant financial interests, broadly defined."
"The goal of these articles is to influence how clinicians take care of patients," Joffe said. "If authors are potentially biased by their financial relationships, readers need to be aware of them so they can take them into account."
"Even better," he added, "would be if all articles were written by people without potentially biasing financial relationships."