Comment on: “Moving from Patient Advocacy to Partnership: A Long and Bumpy Road”

Author’s Reply to Braillon: “Moving from Patient Advocacy to Partnership: A Long and Bumpy Road”

“…Braillon [1] challenges the legitimacy of patient associations participating as partners by repeating unsubstantiated popular rhetoric suggesting that patient associations receiving industry support are by association influenced by those industry sources. His criticism is akin to the implication in the recent paper by McCoy et al [2] entitled ''Conflicts of Interest for PatientAdvocacy Organizations'', which found that a large percentage of a sample of patient advocacy organizations received some industry funding but, in fact, provided no evidence of conflicts of interest in the activities of the organizations.…”