Professional medical associations and their relationships with industry: a proposal for controlling conflict of interest.

Professional medical associations (PMAs) play an essential role in defining and advancing health care standards. Their conferences, continuing medical education courses, practice guidelines, definitions of ethical norms, and public advocacy positions carry great weight with physicians and the public. Because many PMAs receive extensive funding from pharmaceutical and device companies, it is crucial that their guidelines manage both real and perceived conflict of interests.

Selected characteristics and data of psychiatrists in the United States, 2001-2002.

Objective: To provide basic data about the physician workforce as a whole and the relative place of psychiatrists in the total workforce. To provide data on characteristics of psychiatrists' work activities in routine psychiatric practice.

Method: Data were obtained from the American Medical Association's (AMA) Physician Characteristics and Distribution in the United States, 2002-2003 and the 2002 National Survey of Psychiatric Practice, a nationally representative survey of 2,000 randomly selected psychiatrists in the United States.

Achieving board certification in psychiatry: a cohort study.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to track the progress of a cohort of graduates of psychiatry residency training programs in achieving certification by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (ABPN). These data provide a detailed picture of how recent graduates perform on the ABPN's examinations.

Method: The subjects for this study were the 739 new candidates who sat for the part I examination in fall 1994.