Re: Marketing Messages in Continuing Medical Education (CME) Modules on Binge-Eating Disorder (BED)

To the Editor: Jung and Berman¹ suggested medical education companies were not compliant with The Standards for Commercial Support: Standards to Ensure Independence in CME Activities^SM required by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education. Medscape, an accredited provider for over 20 years, has strict policies and procedures that prevent commercial influence on our content. We take every accusation suggesting otherwise very seriously and reviewed the 3 Medscape activities mentioned in the article for validity of the claims made by the authors. Here are our findings:

• All 3 Medscape activities were developed free from influence by commercial interests, including the identification of the educational need, selection of faculty, development of learning objectives and content, dissemination, and outcomes evaluation.

• Two of the 3 Medscape activities were independently peer reviewed prior to posting online and the reviewers found the content to be aligned with the learning objectives and free of bias.

• Two of the 3 Medscape activities are largely text based; 1 is a blend of text and video; the slides mentioned in the article are not in our content.

• Across all 3 Medscape activities, all slides were originally created by Medscape and were not supplied by the faculty.

• The claims in the paper about promoting lisdexamfetamine as a safe and effective drug for binge-eating disorder and/or weight loss do not appear in any of our activities. Rather, the lisdexamfetamine is rarely mentioned as our 3 activities were developed prior to availability of phase-3 data; and when mentioned, it was categorized correctly as a stimulant.

Throughout the article the authors regularly refer to the “CME modules” as a whole and even in their Discussion section state that some of their claims are more conjecture rather than proven. Because of this, we feel strongly that Medscape was guilty by association by having posted content on this topic within the sample time of the study. It is unfortunate the authors had a forum to spread misinformation to propagate their own agenda.