“I’m sorry, Doctor, but we can’t have you give that talk; you have a conflict of interest since you’ve been paid to do research on that medicine.”

“Well, Senator, it’s a conflict of interest for a doctor to sell those crutches in his office.”

“It is the opinion of this newspaper that physicians should declare to each patient any ownership interest they might have in a surgery center so that the patient is aware of any conflict of interest.”

And on and on the drums beat, droning incessantly and insistently about the dreaded conflict of interest.

In a world now run by the terminally attention deficited, with multi-tasking and synergy-seeking all the rage, we apparently have one domain in which nothing but the purest, most antiseptic, monastic and single-minded devotion to a single task and goal is acceptable: the provision of health care in America. Think about it … the simple existence of other interests is de facto evidence of some nefarious conflict of interest.

The underlying assumption appears to be that it is impossible to have any additional interest–ownership of a business, a consulting agreement, stock or stock options–without the ability to devote your primary attention to the best interests of your patient. Any other interest is automatically bad, and every physician is guilty and can’t be proven innocent. How did we come to this?

There are issues and examples both substantial and trivial, and yet each of them is addressed as if they are one and the same. I bought pens last month for the first time in my professional career (I graduated from med school in 1986). It was weird. Who knew that there was a place called OfficeMax and that this huge store had not one but two aisles of pens to peruse?!I think it was Bics in a Kmart the last time I bought a pen. Somehow this fact means that I have been making decisions for my patients based on all those pens I didn’t buy all these years. There’s only one problem with that: I don’t remember a single thing about even one of those pens.

And yet somehow accepting those pens is a conflict of interest. Seriously.

Why is it that if I somehow get something from someone, big or small, even if I perform some service or even buy something from them, that it’s a conflict of interest if some company or other might make money from what I do for my patient? Why is every peripheral interest that exists around the little silo in which I practice medicine–a space occupied by me, my staff, and my patient–why is that automatically a conflict of interest with some sort of negative connotation? That I must be doing something bad? Why not just another interest? Why can’t these things be a “convergence of interests” between what is best for my patient and any of the other stuff that might be going on around us?

Listen, I get it. There have been instances where docs have pushed inferior products on their patients because they had a significant financial incentive to do so. I’m reviewing a med-mal case right now where the plaintiff had an eye problem which resulted in cataract surgery. The cataract surgeons are not being sued, but I looked over the surgical record and saw that they put an inferior lens implant in this guy’s eye, and I know they did that because they own the surgery center and that lens is dirt cheap. That’s a conflict of interest. But for every surgery center owner like this putz I know 50 who put in state-of-the-art implants because that’s what’s best for their patients. Those docs still make a profit, but it’s smaller because they are putting the patient first. Why is that a conflict of interest?

It’s not.

Three different companies make 3 versions of the same kind of medicine, all of which have identical efficacy and safety, and all of which sell within pennies of each other. How does one choose among them if one needs to be prescribed? Is it such a heinous insult to humanity to choose to prescribe the product from the company that pays the doc to consult on some other project? Or the company that brought in lunch? Or the one that left a couple pen lights in the office? Tell me, how and why is this a conflict of interest?

This trivialization of the concept of conflict of interest is actually weakening the protections that we should have against real conflicts that cause real harm. Pushing unproven technology (artificial spinal discs, anyone?) on unsuspecting patients prior to definitive proof in return for obscene consulting agreements, for example. Applying the same degree of moral outrage to a ham sandwich as we do to conflicts which truly pit the best interests of our patients against some profound interest on the part of the physician that prevents him/her from centralizing the patient is farcical moral equivalence. I think it is actually harming our patients.

Our most renowned medical editors, innovators, inventors, and teachers are withdrawing from public positions that require a monk-like aversion to these conflicts of interest. Who will replace them? Will the ascete cocooned in the conflict-free zone and unaware of what developments are on the way contribute? How about the teachers? Will we be taught by specialists who put together the purest power-points from the latest scrubbed articles, priests who are not stained by the sins of the those who are touched by the commerce of medicine by actually touching, you know, patients?

Here’s my bid: a true conflict of interest is one in which there is an essential tension between what is best for a patient, and some other ancillary benefit that might accrue to the physician. Something that makes the doc think about that other benefit first, before the patient. Everything else is an “additional” benefit. We should stop this silliness; stop trivializing the concept of conflict of interest through the dumping together of all other interests in the same gutter. We should all be allowed to ignore all but the truest of conflicts as we continue to put our patients’ interests first.

We should be allowed to seek a convergence of interests.

Darrell White is an ophthalmologist who blogs at Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind.

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