by Greg Mayer
There’s a very disturbing article by Natasha Singer in today’s New York Times. In it, she outlines how a pharmaceutical company paid to have a review article written by a consulting company, got a well placed physician to agree to sign on as the “author” (with minimal input as to its content), and then submitted the article to a medical journal as though it had been written by the physician (without disclosing the true authors or their connection to the pharmaceutical company). The paper highlighted in the article was one of 26 similarly created papers which
emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the risks of taking hormones
which redounded to the benefit of the company, which made the hormone drugs. Later studies showed, however, that the hormones increased the risk of cancer, stroke, heart disease, and dementia.
The paper trail laying out how this shocking scenario played out, all of which is available on the Times’ website, was released as part of a court case. It is a staggering breach of professional norms to act in the ways described. If a student did this, they would probably be brought up for academic discipline.
I am sure the legal defense the Pharmas will use is that they were under the influence of steroids at the time and not responsible for their actions.
It will be interesting to see if the court with allow damages and how much. But would it be surprising if other firms other than “w” did the same? Profit seemed to be more important than the health of the people that were prescribed the hormones.
I thought ghosts didn’t exist.
Truly disturbing. She should be reprimanded.
Ugh, not only is that disgusting in and of itself, but it’ll also have broader ill effects in causing people to lose confidence in the reliability of medical research. How long will it be before some anti-vax kook or AIDS denialist starts citing this incident as “evidence” that scientists are all part of an evil conspiracy headed by “Big Pharma”?
Dr. Gloria Bachman should be disbarred finished and klaar.
The original paper is in PLOS so it’s free to read.
Derek Lowe weighs in. (He’s in the industry.)
Sili– Thanks for the good link.
GCM
That’s incredibly stupid. Complicit physicians should be barred from the medical board for such nonsense. Pharmaceutical companies that engage in such deception should be punished as well.