“These articles contributed to widespread prescription of hormones to women who did not need them, but who were put at risk of blood clots, breast cancer, and other adverse effects,” said Adriane Fugh-Berman, associate professor of physiology and biophysics at Georgetown University Medical Center, a pharmaceutical industry critic.
Adriane’s pissed because Wyeth, maker of the often unnecessary and sometimes dangerous hormones in question, wrote five articles, which reached hundreds of thousands of doctors, praising its own hormones.
Great hormones, if I do say so myself…
I mean, of course Wyeth didn’t reveal in the articles that it was praising its own hormones. That’d be nuts. People would dismiss the findings as advertising rather than science. Nor did the professors of medicine Wyeth paid to put their names on the articles reveal that they didn’t write a word of them. That’d be nuts too. Their reputations as scientists of integrity would go up in smoke.
These are polite people, these ghosts, and, like Gloria Bachmann, another Wyeth ghost, they went out of their way to thank the ghostwriting firm Wyeth paid to write the articles the ghosts didn’t write. (To clarify: The distinction here is between ghosts, who simply float about, and ghostwriters, who put the ghosts’ names on things the ghostwriters have written.)
Leon Speroff, one of the ghosts, wrote the following to his ghostwriters about the article he got paid to pretend he wrote:
“You did a super job of writing this paper – succinct and makes the points very well.”
Leon’s mother taught him to say thank you when he got a gift.
Leon’s mother forgot to tell him not to steal.
James Stein, a [University of Wisconsin] cardiologist, said he was approached twice in the last week to put his name on educational material for different drug companies. He said he turned down both offers because, “frankly, it’s plagiarism.”
“If an undergraduate did this, he would be expelled,” Stein said.
When a drug company puts a doctor’s name on an article that actually was written by a professional writer, it is able to present a more biased and promotional version of an issue as though it were coming from an independent source, Stein and others say.
The company’s ultimate goal is to sell more drugs, said Steven Miles, a physician and professor at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota Medical School.
“These ghostwritten articles are advertising masquerading as scientific reviews,” he said. “It’s dishonest.”
Forgot to tell him not to lie too.
Never too late to learn. Maybe Speroff is reading this.