Whenever I feel like I don’t have quite enough aggravation in my life, I like checking out Stuart Laidlaw’s medical ethics column in the Toronto Star. For example, Stuart’s eagle eye recently spotted a disturbing article about ‘marketing-based medicine’ published in the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry. It looked at the ever-so-slightly sleazy topic of data fishing. It’s what Big Pharma does when science is used improperly to help market their drugs. This includes selective use of clinical trial results to suppress or spin negative results. For the sake of clarity, let’s call this “lying”.
Another example of marketing-based medicine is the alarmingly dangerous practice of medical ghostwriting. This happens when a report that’s bought and paid for by the drug company to give a positive review of one of its products is then published in medical journals under the name of a respected academic who had little (if anything) to do with the actual journal article. See also: Partners in Slime: Why You Should Be Alarmed About Medical Ghostwriting. Continue reading
I’ve often said to my hockey-mad son Ben that we could end on-ice fighting in hockey (not, incidentally, our national sport, but arguably our Canadian obsession) if only the National Hockey League would put 
Let’s not pop the champagne corks just yet to celebrate the recent announcement of new guidelines for Big Pharma from the trade group 
Drug giant Merck & Co. is paying the families of more than 3,100 
