[The relationship between medicine and medical suppliers].

In the last decades, many voices from academic medicine are questioning the relationship between the pharmaceutical industry or other medical suppliers and physicians. Conflict of interest has thus become a major issue of concern in medicine and is becoming increasingly important for medical journals and clinical work. Conflicts of interest may emerge in the daily practice of medicine, in medical and pharmacological research, in the process of publication of medical journals and in the dissemination of public and private medical information, such as conferences, lectures, books, pamphlets, monographs, etc.

[An approach to DSM-5: a breakthrough in psychiatry?].

One of the main problems of current psychiatry is that its diagnostic classification systems are not precise and reliable, they do not help to identify with certainty a specific type of mental disorder and they frequently overlap two or more diagnoses. This may conduce to over diagnosis and overtreatment, which is the main criticism of the DSM system. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) launched recently the DSM-5, the fifth edition of its diagnostic manual, which provides diagnostic criteria for thousands of psychiatrist, psychologist and researchers and who will be using it in the next coming years.

[Randomized clinical trials and real clinical practice].

One of the emerging problems in modern medicine is that part of its highly efficacious treatments do not show significant effectiveness in real world systems of care. Efficacy studies address the appropriate dosages, short term response and feasibility of treatments in carefully selected populations, but they do not necessarily provide information for decisions in clinical practice. This review aims to present strengths and limitations of different methodological types of trials and to offer an overview of how knowledge from clinical trials can be used for clinical practice.