From a PR perspective, there is an urgent need for Big Pharma to appear to be supporting ‘rapid reforms’, and it’s certainly what industry insiders want us to believe. Appropriate conflict of interest disclosure is but one part of this toxic issue. And when you already have pharmaceutical companies paying settlements of $2.3 billion, one wonders how toothless the threat of “future prosecution” actually is. It’s just the cost of doing business when you’re talking about the kind of money to be made here, as Ozz Peters points out.

Consider last year’s Senate investigation into the fully disclosed pharmaceutical financial relationships of one Dr. Alan F. Schatzberg.

The Stanford psychiatrist owns $4.8 million in stock holdings in a drug development company whose drug trials he is supervising, thus understandably raising the investigators’ concern. Yet Dr. Schatzberg told the New York Times that he had “fully complied with Stanford’s rigorous disclosure policies and federal guidelines that pertained to his research.”

How could this kind of insulting denial possibly “benefit clinicians and patients” when even the physicians themselves don’t seem to get it?

Regards,
C.

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Firstly, there is currently a terrible relationship between pharmaceutical companies and healthcare professionals. Pharmaceutical companies have an urgent need to restore trust and the only way to do this through publications is to follow guidelines.

Furthermore, the ICMJE guidelines are compulsory to follow in order for authors to be able to publish in the more ‘prestigious’ journals (e.g. New England Journal of Medicine). These journals matter since, at the end of the day, they are the ones that will increase the stock prices of companies. These guidelines are strictly enforced by the relevant journals.

Finally, this is now a political issue. If pharmaceutical companies do not follow these guidelines then there is a very real chance of future prosecution. You need simply look at recent Senator reports (e.g. http://dianthus.co.uk/senator-grassleys-report-on-ghostwriting) to see evidence of this. Therefore, pharmaceutical companies are changing for the better in this regard. Maybe not always because they want to but because they have to.

There are rapid reforms happening across the industry (I know because I have been part of them), and the good news is that these reforms are ethical and for the benefit of clinicians and patients.

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However, the good news is that things ARE geeting better. Partly as a consequence of the types of negative articles you mention, guidelines have been developed to help ensure that publications produced by pharmaceutical companies and independent authors meet their primary objective of providing sound and trusted educational information to healthcare professionals. Strict adherence to these guidelines should also help to re-establish the damaged reputation of pharmaceutical companies amongst healthcare professionals.

For professionals involved in publication planning, there are a number of guidelines on ethical publication practice. However, the key ones to consult are ICMJE, GPPpc and CONSORT.

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