Clinical practice guidelines are an excellent tool for optimizing care and healthcare costs and reducing unacceptable heterogeneity in clinical practice.1 However, the distribution and implementation of invalid guidelines can cause wasting of resources, ineffective interventions, and even deterioration of patients’ health.1,2 The process of developing clinical practice guidelines is tremendously complex and has been widely described and standardized in the medical literature1,2 and in official documents from recognized international bodies.3,4 These recommendations include clearly defined points on the processes of elaboration, predefining the objectives, choosing a panel of experts, external consultations and associated reviewers, methodology for evaluating the scientific evidence, and the implementation program.4
Among the many editorial works and coordination projects carried out in the collaborative work referred to5, several authors, as well as the boards of the Department of Electrophysiology and Arrhythmias and the Department of Cardiac Pacing, consider that the document referred to by Dr. Martínez-Sellés fails to meet all the previously-described requirements, which is why the obvious and clearly evident paragraph was added: “However, to establish recommendations applicable to clinical practice, consensus documents need to be developed that include the knowledge and perspective of all the subspecialties, particularly electrophysiology and cardiac pacing, involved in this clinical context.” Several weeks before the definitive edit, the final version of the article was sent to all the coauthors, including Dr. Martínes-Sellés, clearly specifying it be modified, without receiving any objection, complaint, or comment regarding the final text.
Finally, we remind Dr. Martínez-Sellés of the possibility of renouncing coauthorship of an article should an author disagree with the contents.