Disclosure isn't enough

Disclosure isn't enoughMost cancer patients in clinical trials don't care if their doctor has financial ties to the trial's sponsor, according to a study decribed in the Washington Post. The article says the survey

undermines "full disclosure" as a central tenet of clinical research.

The authors think that patients may be too overwhelmed by their disease to think critically about such conflicts. That may be true. However, I'm not surprised that disclsoure doesn't work. It reminds me of the situation in financial services, where equity analysts with clear conflicts of interest wrote bullish reports on the companies they covered. Those conflicts were often disclosed but it didn't stop investors from treating the reports as objective. More likely, the investor or patient assumes the analyst or doctor will bend over backwards to ensure objectivity once disclosing the conflict. That's a bad assumption.