Conference-Obsessed Doctors Lose Touch With Reality

Doctors are wasting a ton of time and money on useless conferences, according to infectious-disease specialist Kent Sepkowitz.

So, doctors are suckers like everyone else. Other than wasting some time, does it much matter? Well, yes. The medical convention is bad for doctors, bad for patients, and bad for everyone in between. The state of constant meetings has introduced to medical work the same false urgency that 24-hour news has imposed on the production and presentation of news. With the rare exception of a true calamity (anthrax, AIDS, West Nile, mad cow), we don't have enough to talk about. So we sex up the facts to create the next urgent crisis. It's all vigilance, all panic, all the time.

"The ersatz excitement of the endless convention obscures the real slow march of science and medicine, and erodes their discourse," Sepkowitz writes. Everyone in between, I should point out, includes journalists who feel compelled to cover the manufactured news that comes out of these conferences. The image is from the American College of Surgeons Conference, which I attended in San Francisco in 2006.

Conventional Wisdom? The Excesses of the Medical Conference Craze [Slate]