An Oregonian editorial about ghostwritten medical articles evokes the university subculture that produces professors with no compunction about taking money in exchange for having their names put on studies written not by them, but by corporations selling pills.

There’s seldom any indication that these ghosts have read the articles they’re pretending – in exchange for money from the pharmaceutical company – to have written.

The practice is widespread and will, UD predicts, never really end. An entire subsidiary industry — the businesses that actually write the ghostwritten article and then chase down corrupt professors to pretend authorship — has evolved to serve pharma’s need to give new drugs the appearance of scientific legitimacy. As long as journals play along, how will we ever be able to stop it?

A commenter on the editorial writes:

It is certainly unethical to add your name to a ghost written paper. Unfortunately, it really isn’t that rare – especially in these sorts of fields – to have everyone on the research team, from the post-docs to the Principal Investigator to all put their names on a paper, even though it would be physically impossible for all of them to have actually contributed to the writing (and implausible for them to have personally contributed to the research). So you often end up having a dozen or more authors and vitaes with a couple of hundred publications.

I recall that when I was a grad student I questioned my advisor adding his name to my paper. I got the response that I was lucky he was allowing me to keep my name on it. I didn’t ask any more questions after that.

Get the picture?

The Oregonian editorial adds:

A pharmaceutical company pays a writer to write a report touting a drug’s benefits, with the author “TBD” (to be decided). Then the company shops for a prestigious researcher to sign off on it and pump up the findings with institutional credibility. The results, published in a respected medical journal, often are widely disseminated in newspapers, magazines and medical blogs. If the news reverberates long enough in this echo chamber, the drug’s supposed benefits can become conventional wisdom.

… “This is actually putting your name on something without any firsthand knowledge about it,” explains Dr. Susan Tolle, director of Oregon Health & Science University’s Center for Ethics in Health Care.

The good news, Tolle says, is that this practice is being cleaned up. OHSU and other research institutions have cracked down on it. The bad news is that it continues to infect the journal literature that is still in circulation and has entered the mainstream of medical lore.

Prestigious researchers who loan their names — for a fee — to drug companies for such articles not only wind up duping patients but also other doctors and ultimately cast doubt on reports that are perfectly legitimate…

The editors call for an end to the practice, but again UD asks: How? The drug companies won’t end it — especially given the noises people are making lately about ending direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs — and the journals are always going to be amiable dunces who understand where their advertising revenue comes from.

That leaves the universities whose halls the ghosts haunt. The universities who boast of professors who flit from industry-compromised continuing medical education outings, to undisclosed hawking of pills and devices, to the prostitution of their integrity in industry-compromised research journals.

We know from the farce of campus conflict of interest management that universities too will do nothing. How, precisely, can they crack down? Has any ghost lost her job? Suffered any penalty? Even been acknowledged – after her exposure in the press – as a ghost by her university?

That leaves the consumer.

Feeling her way alone, in the dark.