Episode Details

In part 1 I talked about information that was brought to me by two senior residents who wanted people to know that they are being invited to “educational summits” that are actually being run by doctors with massive undisclosed ties to the pharmaceutical companies that make the drugs that are recommended in the summits. I did some digging around the company that is behind this to try to get some information about what’s going on.

The company that created both of these summits is PCMG, Primary Care Metabolic Group. Their tagline is “Serving to Educate Primary Care Clinicians on Metabolic Issues.” The words “Evidence Based Medicine” appear prominently in the banner at the top of each page. Their homepage states:

The Primary Care Metabolic Group (PCMG) is a national educational initiative providing comprehensive metabolic disease resources. PCMG’s mission is to provide an easily accessible repository of metabolic disease information for primary care clinicians that includes disease management and raising standards of patient care through the dissemination of best practices and educational information.

Their ”services” include

·         Monthly metabolic disease news articles from our partners

·         Opportunities for FREE CME

·         Member discounts for upcoming CME conferences and summits

As a quick aside, CME stands for Continuing Medical Education. Doctors must obtain a certain number of CMEs in order to maintain their state licensure. The number of CME hours and requirements as to topics varies by state.  Full disclosure, many of the workshops/talks I give for physicians provide CMEs. None, as far as I know, has ever been sponsored by a pharmaceutical company and I don’t receive any money from the pharmaceutical industry.

Back to PCMG. The word “partners” struck me in the first bullet point. What do they mean by “partners?” As I scrolled down the page I see that they are welcoming a new “collaborator” – the Ob*sity Action Coalition. It says “This national nonprofit coalition is fighting to eliminate weight bias and discrimination, elevating the conversation of weight and its impacts on health, and offering a community of support to people affected. OAC also offers resources for clinicians, as well as a database of clinicians who treat patients with ob*sity.”

It doesn’t say that this “national nonprofit coalition” has Novo Nordisk (manufacturer of the weight loss drug Wegovy and one of the leading pharma companies price gouging on insulin) as its main funder, with the vast majority of its funding coming from pharmaceutical companies and weight loss surgery interests. It doesn’t say that their plan to “eliminate weight bias” is focused on pushing for insurance coverage of their dangerous drugs and surgeries, or that they are trying to sell the “we don’t want to stigmatize fat people, we just want to make as much money as we can trying to eradicate them from the earth” line that is not, in any way, an anti-stigma approach.

After reading the entire website, I called PCMG to ask what they meant by “partners” as well as who was funding the free and discounted CME training.

I spoke with Nora Williams. I opened by explaining that I was writing an article about CME trainings and I had a couple quick questions about how their trainings were structured. She interrupted me to say that she was “suspicious” because she didn’t know who I was, or what outlet I was writing for, or what my story was about (in my defense, she hadn’t let me get that far.) She told me that if I sent her an email she would “consider it.” For me, this has the ring of a company that knows they are involved in things that they would rather not have brought to light, but of course, that’s just my gut feeling. I emailed her after our call in the afternoon of 1/7/23 and am still awaiting a res