Beware of the Podium Pirates

In a word, it was a “strange” phone call. It started out normal enough when the fellow on the other end of the line asked if I was interested in speaking at an upcoming EMS conference. He had just given me the conference dates when the call took a strange turn, as he said, “And you will be required to mention the name of such-and-such a drug prominently a minimum of four times during your one-hour keynote.”

At that moment, I was thinking, “Geez, I’ve never even heard of this drug.” Now, by no means am I Mr. Pharmacology, but I was pretty confident that this drug was not currently being used by EMS providers. In response to his mandate, I asked, “And why would I talk about or mention a drug I’ve never heard of and don’t know anything about, and that has nothing to do with any of the 40 or so continuing education topics I regularly present?”

“Because they will be sponsoring you to come to this conference,” came his almost- instantaneous reply.

At that point, I had an uneasy feeling and explained both my educational and ethical concerns to him. Again, he replied without hesitation: “Well, you need to get over it, or you won’t be coming to this conference.” That answer served two purposes. First, it was now painfully clear to me that the educational content of my talk was not of much importance to this gentleman and his organization. What was important was using an educational platform to advertise a new drug to a large group of EMS conference attendees all at once. Second, I knew for sure that I was not going to be speaking at that conference. At that point, I thanked him for his call, declined his offer and hung up.

While you might think that this is a rare occurrence, it isn’t. Just a few months after my strange phone call, I was at a conference, sitting in on a presentation that, according to the conference brochure, was on trauma assessment. However, I couldn’t help but notice that the physician who was presenting the talk was not focusing on assessing trauma patients; rather, the focus was on when to call for aeromedical transport for trauma patients. Once I was keyed in to this aspect of the presentation, I counted almost a dozen times during the one-hour talk that this occurred. After the fact, I checked around and found out that the presenter was actually one of a group of investors in a physician-owned helicopter service. Once I had that knowledge, I sent a letter to the group that put on the conference to share this information. While they did, in fact, know about this physician’s financial involvement in the local helicopter service, they had no clue that he did little more than show lots of graphic photos and simply advertise for his helicopter service, rather than try to improve the attendees’ knowledge about trauma assessment.

Please understand, I have no problem whatsoever with speakers being sponsored at conferences, as these corporate sponsorships help keep the cost of attending a conference more affordable. This is especially important to the many volunteer providers in our profession, who often pay some or all of their expenses out of their own pockets to attend a continuing-education conference. In most cases, you will find that sponsorships frequently come with little more than having their name on conference advertisements andbrochures and then being mentioned as sponsors during the speaker’s introduction. These sponsoring groups are above-board and truly have the best educational interests of the attendees and EMS in general at heart. They are to be commended for freeing up financial support in these tough economic times.

My problem comes when a speaker basically sells/endorses a drug, product, device or service while standing behind a podium and pretending to be teaching. To be better prepared to identify these educational scams, here are a couple of things to be alert for.

• Any presenter who speaks about only one particular drug, product, device or service, even though there are multiple drugs, products, devices or services that perform very similar or identical functions and are currently available in the marketplace.
• Any time a drug, product, device or service is mentioned in a presentation, but appears to have little or no relevance to the actual topic being presented. Be especially wary if these references occur more than once, as they often do.

Should either of these red flags appear, take the initiative after the session to ask the presenter straight out if he has any financial interest in the company that makes the drug, product, device or service he appears to be selling/endorsing. Another option is to ask the conference coordinator if speakers sign disclosure statements. If they do, ask about the speaker in question and whether he has disclosed any financial involvement. If speakers don’t sign a disclosure statement, encourage the conference to have them do so. Still another option is to voice your concerns to either your state agency or to the credentialing body that has approved the topic for continuing education.

Don’t let any presenter steal your conference education from you. If a presenter is truly above-board, you will know up front if he is being sponsored and by whom. Hiding behind an educational podium and providing nothing more than an infomercial is just being a Podium Pirate.

Until next month…