Pharmaceutical multinationals know best. They formulate great new drugs and want nothing more than to drop them immediately
into our eager mouths. Testing and approval, a bother, may be avoided in a variety of ways, including fabricating your own scientific journal full of fake research touting the greatness of the drugs.
… Merck cooked up a phony, but real sounding, peer reviewed journal and published favorably looking data for its products in them. Merck paid Elsevier to publish such a tome, which neither appears in MEDLINE or has a website…
… I’m sure many a primary care physician was given literature from Merck that said, “As published in Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, Fosamax outperforms all other medications….” Said doctor, or even the average researcher, wouldn’t know that the journal is bogus.
… [An] Australian rheumatologist named Peter Brooks … served on the “honorary advisory board” of this “journal”. His take: “I don’t think it’s fair to say it was totally a marketing journal”, apparently on the grounds that it had excerpts from peer-reviewed papers. However, in his entire time on the board he never received a single paper for peer-review… . Such “throwaways” of non-peer reviewed publications and semi-marketing materials are commonplace in medicine. But wouldn’t that seem odd for an academic journal? Apparently not. Moreover, Peter Brooks had a pretty lax sense of academic ethics anyway: he admitted to having his name put on a “advertorial” for pharma within the last ten years, says The Scientist…
It is this attitude within companies like Merck and among doctors that allows scandals precisely like this to happen. While the scandals with Merck and Vioxx are particularly egregious, we know they are not isolated incidents…
May 4th, 2009 at 1:41AM
Business as usual in this industry (see the book "Corporate crime in the pharmaceutical industry" by Braithwaite, 1984, Routledge). Braithwaite reported that several pharma firms instituted a "vice-president responsible for going to jail" so only one company exec would need to know about corrupt activities. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is beyond them.
May 5th, 2009 at 9:14PM
Screw editors, blue pencils at ready.
Self-publishing makes me quite heady.
My "Journal of Dave"
Brings the stroking I crave.
I’ve given me six prizes already.
May 5th, 2009 at 10:19PM
Excellent, Dave. Final line’s a winner.