Ditch the opening ceremony and name(less) tags,

and publicly disclose potential conflict of interest

Every year, numerous national and regional obstetrics and gynecology

(OB/GYN) meetings are held in China. While these meetings

provide ample opportunities for scholarly communication and the

assimilation of new diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, several

troubling oddities of these meetings are at direct odds with international

norms and seriously underminethe very purposes of these

meetings.

First and foremost, an elaborate, sometimes excruciatingly long,

opening ceremony, featuring touchy-feely speeches given by a slew

of government officials and dignitaries in descending pecking order,

is now a fixture of all meetings. The seemingly incessant jabbering,

even a few minutes long, may feel like eternity to the hundreds of

participants coming to the meeting for scholarly purposes. The ceremony

is sometimes followed by orparalleled with group photos or,

more theatrically, evenautographs on a wall-sized billboard designated

specifically for very important persons (VIPs).

While these ceremonies couldprovide the VIPs an intoxicating

sense of self-importance and,quite often, handsome fees, they

add no value at all to the meetings and in fact show awanton disregard

to the interest of each andevery participant who paid his/her

registration fee. At the very least, they are inefficient: the meeting

could be a feat or bummer withor without these speakers’ blessing.

The second oddity is the nametags (or, more appropriately, nameless

tags) worn by meeting participants, which frequently display no

name at all and are simply onlytwo kinds: Delegate (participant) and

Distinguished Guest (or in somecases simply “VIP”).

One major function of all professional meetings is to provide a

forum to facilitate the exchange of views and ideas among meeting

participants. But this can bebest accomplished when two sides of

the communication are equal. The name(less) tags are a de-facto status

symbol, artificially and literally generating an inequality in status

and making genuine scientific exchange difficult, if not impossible.

Lastly, when industry-sponsored seminars sprinkled in meetings

are now common, few, if any, speakers at these seminars in the Chinese

OB/GYN meetings publicly declare any potential conflicts of interest,

even though they are paid handsomely by the sponsor to

speak on the topic that isrelated with the products that his/her

sponsor make. Some even becomea hired gun, blatantly promoting

the product(s) at the seminar to the unsuspecting audience. This is

essentially a misuse of thespeaker’s scholarly reputation for his/

her financial gains, and is entirely and egregiously unethical.

As of now, virtually alldiagnostic and therapeutic procedures

and drugs in OB/GYN that havebeen proven to be effective are first

invented or discovered in the West. Even numerous guidelines used

in the practice are written byour Western peers. As the most populous

country and now the second largest economic entity and the

producer of scientific papers in the world, China has the responsibility

to help to advance the OB/GYN field. However, the oddities

now prevailing in the OB/GYN professional meetings effectively

hinder the advancement of the field and should be reformed. Meetings,

big or small, can be perfectly fine without any opening ceremony

as our Western colleagues have shown. In fact, it would be

more efficient time-wise if no opening speech is given by government

officials. Name tags showing the bearer’s name and affiliation

should help to facilitate freeand effective exchange of scientific

ideas and views. Public disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

before lectures in general and specifically in industry-sponsored

seminars should provide the audience with awareness necessary

to judge the value of the lecture content.

This is particularly urgent since as of now many OB/GYN meetings

in China are faced with increasingly dwindling participants

(who pay the registration fee out of their own pocket) and some national

meetings now increasingly resort to the quota system

(assigning certain number of participants for specific institutions).

In fact, the registration fees of most, if not all, participants are

now shouldered by industry. Aside from the quality, the oddities

eluded above may also be responsible for this unenviable situation.

While the alignment with prevailing international norms of professional

meetings will not make China a leader in OB/GYN overnight,

it should help eliminate the elitism underlying these

oddities, foster a healthy cultureof scientific meetings, provide an

environment that is conducive to free exchange of scientific views

and ideas, and prepare young physicians to attune to international

norms. Consequently, it is timeto ditch the opening ceremony and

nameless tags, and publicly disclose potential conflicts of interest in

all OB/GYN meetings in China. And the time is now.

（本文作为 Letter to Editor发表在Gynecology and Minimally Invasive Therapy 2016年第1期上。

http://www.e-gmit.com/article/S2213-3070(15)00172-0/pdf）