Do I have a conflict of interest? Yes

Excerpt

Conflict of interest is part of the daily life of human beings since ever. It is a permanent concern in the practice of law, and for instance, an attorney cannot represent a third party whom interests are opposed to those of his/her client. In the field of health science, in the early sixties, the issue of scientific people taking advantages from a government appointment was already a matter of debate [1]. In the past decade, in the number of scientific publications addressing the issue of conflict of interest in medicine increased remarkably (from about 600 in 2008 to roughly 30,000 in 2017) [2]. The observation that a majority of US academic institutions have no or insufficient policies covering the relationship between industries and members of institutional review boards [3] raised public concern [4], and may have contributed to increasing interest for this topic in the medical literature. …