A leading medical information company has been urged to cancel a series of new education courses on smoking cessation funded by the tobacco industry giant Philip Morris International (PMI).
Physicians and academics have rounded on Medscape for partnering with PMI on five courses launched in the past few months, and they have called for stricter oversight by certification bodies.
Anna Gilmore, professor of public health and director of the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath, UK, said that Medscape had “now lost all credibility and has some serious questions to answer. PMI lost all credibility decades ago, despite its ceaseless and highly misleading attempts to rehabilitate its image. It has now sunk to a new low.”
Medscape has temporarily taken down some of the courses while it carries out a review, but it told The BMJ that it had so far “found no evidence of deviation from Medscape’s strict quality and integrity standards.”
The outcry centres on the
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