What Does 'Unpaid Consultant' Signify? A Survey of Euphemistic Language in Conflict of Interest Declarations.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Inadequate competing interest declarations present interpretive challenges for editors, reviewers, and readers. We systematically studied a common euphemism, 'unpaid consultant,' to determine its occurrence in declarations and its association with vested interests, authors, and journals. METHODS: We used Google Scholar, a search engine that routinely includes disclosures, to identify 1164 occurrences and 787 unique biomedical journal publications between 1994 and 2014 that included one or more authors declaring themselves as an "unpaid consultant." Changes over time were reckoned with absolute and relative yearly rates, the latter normalized by overall biomedical publication volumes. We further analyzed declarations according to author, consultancy recipient, and journal. RESULTS: We demonstrate increases in the use of "unpaid consultant" since 2004 and show that such uninformative declarations are overwhelmingly (801/865, 92.6%) associated with for-profit companies and other vested interests, most notably in the pharmaceutical, device, and biotech industries. CONCLUSIONS: Disclosing 'unpaid' relationships with for-profit companies typically signals but does not explain competing interests. Our findings challenge editors to respond to the increasing use of language that may conceal rather than illuminate conflicts of interest.

Physician, Steel Thyself.

A family physician who has long tried to prevent patients from falling victim to health scams and disinformation recently confronted an unexpected challenge of his own.

Structural properties of spatial representations in blind people: Scanning images constructed from haptic exploration or from locomotion in a 3-D audio virtual environment.

When people scan mental images, their response times increase linearly with increases in the distance to be scanned, which is generally taken as reflecting the fact that their internal representations incorporate the metric properties of the corresponding objects. In view of this finding, we investigated the structural properties of spatial mental images created from nonvisual sources in three groups (blindfolded sighted, late blind, and congenitally blind). In Experiment 1, blindfolded sighted and late blind participants created metrically accurate spatial representations of a small-scale spatial configuration under both verbal and haptic learning conditions. In Experiment 2, late and congenitally blind participants generated accurate spatial mental images after both verbal and locomotor learning of a full-scale navigable space (created by an immersive audio virtual reality system), whereas blindfolded sighted participants were selectively impaired in their ability to generate precise spatial representations from locomotor experience. These results attest that in the context of a permanent lack of sight, encoding spatial information on the basis of the most reliable currently functional system (the sensorimotor system) is crucial for building a metrically accurate representation of a spatial environment. The results also highlight the potential of spatialized audio-rendering technology for exploring the spatial representations of visually impaired participants.