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Having faith in the efficiency of treatment administered within one’s own department is not enough. With modern accreditation procedures, physicians will be asked to publish their results (which will be controlled).

The use of codification rules for medical records and results will enable the elaboration of major hospital and general population registries (similar to those published by the French Comprehensive Cancer Centres in the Permanent Cancer Survey or to major FIGO registries on gynaecological tumours).

The annual publication of activity and result reports will become a mandatory requirement:

• to enable financial authorities to control expenses,

• to enable other health professionals to evaluate the health care facilities to which they address their patients,

• and finally for patients (or consumer associations) who are taking a more and more active role in therapeutic decisions concerning their own health.

Among the various activity data, publication of results including the occurrence of side effects, will become mandatory.

The ethics code requires:

• the publication of good results in order to develop new methodologies,

• the publication of poor results, thus eliminating a failing therapeutic method. Otherwise, such inefficient methods, even in the absence of any positive published results, will continue to be applied to patients by medical colleagues unaware of such poor results,

• the publication of complications, accidents or side effects.

The necessity to publish one’s own results is the best incentive for quality and improvement.

Of course, the natural place to publish is in professional reviews and international papers with committee review. Sound criticism before publication can only but improve the quality of the presentation. Unfortunately, many quality reviews do not publish enough negative results which are then forwarded to other less renowned or studied reviews. excessive

General public newspapers or magazines are not the place for medical results to be published. They are only tribunes for physicians to advertise themselves. The medical scientific community and the health ethics authorities should be more severe in reminding physicians of this elementary intellectual probity.