Abstract
Dear Editor:
For most of us, the first exposure to the concept of medical conferences dates back to the times when we were resident physicians. It used to be exciting and filled with a sense of pride that we would be attending our first medical conference with so many inventive minds sharing their innovations. But at the back of our minds, it was part of our escapism routine wherein we would enjoy the day's work without doing the day's work. The theme was simple: that we would get to go on an ‘educational’ tour with no surety of getting educated. Still, it would be a win-win situation, as we would get to visit a new city with a laid-back education-vacation. Everybody wonders why educators turn a blind eye to this perspective followed by students of medicine when there is a huge investment (both economic as well as personnel) made by the educators in ensuring good-to-great conference attendance by these students.
The reasons are simple. While pursuing the goal of continuing medical education, the education administrators have gone overboard in their well-intentioned pursuits of education, and the booming ‘business' of medical conferences is the brainchild of this overkill. It is certain that there is a constant need for keeping up with the updates in medicine; but the bigger question is how many practitioners change their practice of medicine based on the conference didactics. It can be certainly said that it is not very often. 1 However, these medical conferences assure the attendees that depending on their individual skills, they will be able to better their social networking possibilities by putting up their inventive-innovative face-and-mind in front of the audience formed by their peers. Times have changed since the 1990s when medical literature was beaming with reports of different benefits of conferences 2 that were not limited to medical education's promotion, innovative research inspirations, available data's evaluation, and a podium to share medical presentations. The reflections of these changes are evident in a recent publication 3 that has questioned whether medical conferences are serving any purpose besides recreation and social networking platforms for busy and enterprising physicians.
The next question is what good these medical conferences do for the cities organizing these medical conferences. These medical conferences attract the pedants, scholastics, and ardent researchers to present their discoveries and inventions: the bookworms and lab rats who possibly would have never left their classes or labs to enjoy the charms of sunlight and the chills of snowfall. With the backdrop of educational presentations, the medical conferences provide them the much-needed vacation for realigning their internal and external energies so as to resume their future academic pursuits with new zeal and enthusiasm. Hence, effectively, it is our understanding that the majority of the attendees are nurturing a culture of conference tourism and the remaining of them are just tourists at their hearts who are attending these medical conferences. Moreover, the environmental burden of this ‘conference tourism’ is related to the unnecessary intercontinental and cross-country air travels that contribute to constantly worsening human-induced global warming.4,5 Till recently, the paper-based abstract books and posters, as well as program and exhibitor guides of medical conferences, were additionally contributing to this environmental burden. E-submissions, e-posters, and e-programs are certainly moves in the right direction by the neo-eco-friendly medical conferences.
The next big concern is how to contain this situation and how to offset this overkill. Balancing the scale between the measures of educational and tourist opportunities versus the measures of economic and environmental burden is the primary aim for offsetting conference tourism's overkill. The need for continuing medical education is valid. However, the means of education should undergo radical makeovers to assure that tourism and education can be made as exclusive as possible. Loco-regional conferences with international webcasting of sessions will solidify loco-regional networking (the backbone to the supportive environment needed for medicine to flourish) and will garner international inputs (economic and academic) with awareness of loco-regional needs for greater impact on the loco-regional medical programs.5,6 Webinars and distance learning sessions allow continuity in medical education updates within the confines of comfortable home and personal offices, and hence, these programs should be promoted instead of uncountable medical conferences. 4 The primary pursuits of university academics and research can be further enhanced 5 by delegating the sharing and presentation of ongoing research's progress to password-protected and paid service for the centralized web-database of these results. Though this used to be the role of the published medical literature, the booming medical knowledge and incapacity of the published medical literature to keep up with the limitless plethora of innovations (potential as well as perfected) requires the establishment of this web-database that will be the meeting point for the too-stringent medical literature and too-fluid medical conferences. The medical conference should be different from the Olympics wherein the sole goal is ‘display’ of sporting prowess and that too does not happen more often than every four years.
In summary, even though the discussed changes will lead to attendees missing out on the medical conference opportunities at various world cities, these changes will instigate them to vacation without any clubbed medical conference; and we are confident that these good-old-vacations will not be as many as the medical conferences attended by practitioners these days. Thereafter the environmental burden of medical conference tourists will be markedly reduced eventually, because the educational sessions will be information technology based distance learning programs with a much wider audience, and the vacationing will relegate back to good-old leisurely sunbathing and mountain skiing.