Misleading title

“Doctors behaving badly?”1 was an anticlimax. It was not, as would be expected, an exposure of misconduct by doctors, but dealt with the potential conflict of interest that occurs when they interact with the pharmaceutical industry. No evidence of doctors “behaving badly” was provided, yet a solution to this potential problem was proposed — “disclosure” (ie, yet more paperwork), accompanied by a disclaimer that this was unlikely to work.

This is an important issue, but the content of the article cannot justify such a misleading title. I can only assume it was the result of editorial intervention, in which case there is some hypocrisy at work, given that the inside front cover and the outside back cover of the same issue of the Journal are taken up with full-page drug advertisements, and within, a $10 000 prize was offered for the best original research article published in the Journal (sponsored by a drug company).

The second article, From the Editor’s Desk “Tilting at titles”,2 which cited the dreaded Australian values, suggested that titles such as “doctor” should be trashed altogether and replaced by an introduction such as “Hello. I’m Jean Smith. I am a urologist and together we will confront your prostate problem” — a statement that is unlikely to give great confidence to the average digger.

Doctor Samuel Johnson put this argument to rest in 1775:3