TY - JOUR T1 - Fighting about conflict of interest: where should the balance lie? JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 66 LP - 67 DO - 10.3399/bjgp16X683569 VL - 66 IS - 643 AU - David Misselbrook Y1 - 2016/02/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/66/643/66.abstract N2 - You never know what will start a battle. However, you do not expect food fights between elderly aunts at the village teashop — one looks on in puzzled embarrassment. For doctors the relationship between medicine and the pharmaceutical industry seems hard to discuss in polite company and last summer saw a remarkable spat between two venerable journals, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and the British Medical Journal (BMJ).The NEJM is well known for 30 years of leadership in defining, declaring, and limiting the possible effects of conflicts of interest (COI) in medicine. It was therefore surprising in May to see a series of three discussion articles in the NEJM by one of the journal’s national correspondents, Lisa Rosenbaum, supported by the editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Drazen. They question whether we are now too paranoid about COI, and whether we are succumbing to ‘moral outrage’ rather than reason.1–4 Many found the suggestion that the well-recognised barriers between pharma and academia should be weakened or even partly abandoned to be frankly astonishing. The language was also surprising, referring to widespread COI concerns as a ‘contagion’, and a ‘moral outrage campaign’.Perhaps most remarkably, two previous editors-in-chief of the NEJM together with a former deputy editor then used the platform of the BMJ (itself a notable campaigner against the risk of pharma-sponsored … ER -