Category Archives: Medical ghostwriting

When you use bad science to sell drugs

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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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 →

How are hockey-playing goons the same as “puzzled” medical journal editors?

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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hockey calgary fightI’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 me in charge for just one week. But the folks who do run the NHL clearly have no appetite for banning hockey fighting, or they would have acted to end it by now.

Despite their feeble protests about the unacceptability of fighting and the known dangers of career-ending concussions, team owners tolerate cheap shots by beefy goons who spear, hit, and drop their gloves to fight. The League accepts it, the owners accept it, the players accept it, and the fans apparently love it.

There is, alas, no organizational will to ban violence on the ice.

And much like hockey goons, medical journal editors could end the appallingly unethical and dangerous practice of medical ghostwriting in one week, but these editors clearly have no appetite for banning ghostwriting in their journals, or they would have acted to end it by now.

There is, alas, no organizational will to ban medical ghostwriting. Continue reading →

All bark, no bite: new Big Pharma trials/ghostwriting guidelines

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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pills purple mixLet’s not pop the champagne corks just yet to celebrate the recent announcement of new guidelines for Big Pharma from the trade group Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America (PhRMA).  The wordy guidelines are called Principles on Conduct of Clinical Trials and Communication of Clinical Trial Results. They went into effect last week, and are a response to mounting scandals and scrutiny about how clinical research trials are conducted and reported. These new principles also cover issues like authorship contributions and medical ghostwriting; disclosure of financial conflicts of interest; public registration of clinical trials; and publicly accessible summaries of all clinical trial results.

These last two are apparently a stab at addressing the current reality that negative clinical trial results either never see the light of day or are only selectively reported to favour the drugs being tested. The principles have been hailed by some as a step in the right direction, although many point out that they may have more bark than bite in addressing, for example, the chronic problem of medical ghostwriting. Continue reading →

Medical ghostwriting and ‘Guest Authorship’: twins separated at birth?

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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vancouver purpleParticipants at this month’s International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication in Vancouver heard an interesting medical journal survey report on ghostwriting vs. ‘guest authorship’ that has me scratching my head in confusion. Presented by the Journal of the American Medical Association, the report confirmed that the prevalence of both ‘honorary’ and ‘ghost authors’ in medical journal articles is “still a concern”. 

Here’s a dose of reality for JAMA editors: it’s not just a “concern”.  It’s global fraud being perpetrated upon the innocent patients of the world thanks in part to the lax (some more cynical than I might say ‘non-existent’) controls in place in many medical journal editors’ offices. For example:

  • only four of the journals surveyed ask and then publish information on who the actual article authors are (Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA, Lancet, and PLoS Medicine)
  • New England Journal of Medicine claims that the journal “asks about author contributions but doesn’t publish them.” (Earth to NEJM: this is the same as not asking).
  • Nature Medicine has “no instructions to authors about disclosing author contributions.”

This sounds like a de facto stamp of approval for the common practice of ghostwriting and ‘guest writing’. But by now, you may be asking the question: “Carolyn, what is the difference between ‘guest writing’ and ‘ghostwriting’ in research published in medical journals”?  The answer, my fellow Nags, is:  not much.  But here’s JAMA’s official definition:  Continue reading →