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.

From today’s The Tennessean:

A new study just released by the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy shows 90% of bank notes from 18 cities have traces of cocaine on them.

DC topped the list of cities where the testing took place with ninety five percent of the sampled bills testing positive. The study indicates a 20% rise in the amount of cocaine on DC’s money over the past two years.

… Chemists at George Washington University confirm the accuracy of the test results, indicating the highest cocaine levels were detected on five, ten and twenty dollar bills.

Doctor Akos Vertes and his assistant Peter Nemes tested bills Monday evening using a technique recently discovered at Purdue University, “We apply high voltage. This high voltage drives the liquid to the tip of the paper… this gives off ions and these ions are characteristic of the chemicals that were on the paper.”

Former Mayor Marion Barry has a theory on why more cocaine is on DC money these days, “From what I can gather from the study, Washington is no different than other large cities but it means a shift in drug use.”

Barry thinks tough times might be driving cocaine use but others say it could be the result of contaminated bills mixing with regular currency inside ATMs.

UD‘s head is spinning. Help her out on this one.

No problem with her colleagues in Chemistry zapping coked up Jacksons. Someone’s gotta do it, and the English department lacks the lab and expertise. Plus it’s always interesting, as on annual Share Your Research Day, to find out what other professors are doing.

But Marion Barry? Has he really gone from the nation’s most notorious crack user to someone who gathers this and gathers that about our drug problem?

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Update: Apparently Barry has. Vertes reproduces the local news segment about his cocaine work.

Today is Bad Poetry Day, an important, neglected, American holiday on which for just one day out of the year we face up to the fact that most poetry is terrible and demoralizing.

The much-touted National Poetry Month tries to make us believe that our poetry strengthens us as a nation, but in our hearts we know most American verse is demoralizing. Not merely because it’s so bad, but because we’ve got to walk around pretending it’s good.

Let us, on this day, begin by revisiting something UD wrote some time back about National Poetry Month:

“…[T]aste occasionally dies,” writes Brian Phillips, surveying our mobbed up, wheezy poetry scene. “The capabilities of taste are not present to the same degree in every art audience; they will sometimes, with regard to one medium or another, seem to weaken, to shrivel away.” And when they do, “a kind of obscurity, something felt but not quite formulated, overwhelms aesthetic judgment. It becomes difficult to say what is good or bad, and worse, what one likes or dislikes…. [T]he loss of a sense of a shared standard of value has left readers of poetry somewhat numbed in their own preferences. There is something oddly anonymous and neutral in the expressions of enthusiasm one encounters for contemporary poetry, in book-jacket blurbs, for instance; one often feels as though it is the system of poetry itself, or some aspect of the poetry culture, that is being approved of, and not any poet or poem. … [T]aste [has] dissolved until we find ourselves unable to form intuitive aesthetic judgments, unable to know the ground on which such judgments could legitimately be formed, and thus adrift in an indifference that we ritualistically pretend is something else.”

That something else is the neutral enthusiasm for verse as a sunbeam in this dark world of ours.

Phillips continues: “The problem for American poetry is really a problem of taste, the way in which the power of intuitive judgment, and the kind of aesthetic experience it makes possible, is really what is felt to have been lost. … We are living among the consequences, in other words, of what has been a profound weakening over the last two hundred years of the objective capability of taste. … There is now virtually no sense among poetry readers of a fixed and commonly accessible standard of aesthetic value, either as a set of widely accepted critical principles or as a sense functioning intuitively among readers.”

The public thing, the NPM thing, the thing about how we have to get more people to read poetry, degrades the artform, which will always be of interest to few readers. “James Longenbach,” Phillips notes, ”has written that poetry’s expanding audience ‘has by and large been purchased at the cost of poetry’s inwardness.’ And Richard Howard has urged that the only way to ’save’ poetry is to restore it ‘to that status of seclusion and even secrecy that characterizes our only authentic pleasures.’”

Real critics of poetry, like William Logan and August Kleinzahler, whip up national furies against themselves because they refuse the robotic smiling indifference Phillips describes and instead take poetry with the seriousness the form deserves. For them, every day is bad poetry day. If you read them, you will begin to understand the elements of bad poetry. Here are some of them:

emotionality / sentimentality / over-sincerity / cloying sweetness

the opposite of this also creates bad poetry: faking emotions

pretentiousness, vanity: revelling in your depression, your passion, whatever

a desperate desire to be original that makes you cutesy, weird, obtuse, unserious

formlessness — the poem is, for instance, merely disconnected fragments

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Feel free to add to this list. And to the next list: Elements of good poetry:

language mastery – linguistic brilliance, beauty of expression

rewarding complexity – complexity adequate to the complexity of life, not complexity for its own sake

formal control – an understanding of the history of poetic forms, and an ability to work within, or depart intelligently from, that history

“Seventy-eight percent [of Americans polled] believed that accepting gifts from the pharmaceutical industry influences their doctors’ prescribing habits.”

Know why it’s so many?

Because accepting gifts from the pharmaceutical industry influences doctors’ prescribing habits.

The Washington Post anticipates the establishment of a public database that will let patients look up their doctors’ industry ties.

… should really stop, writes the editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Especially since the grubber in question is the University of Wisconsin’s medical school, which got a million dollars from a drug company to put UW’s good name behind the company’s synthetic testosterone.

Said testosterone is not only of uncertain benefit to men older than 45; it might actually be dangerous. But its maker, Solvay, touted it on a continuing medical education website which offered CME credit to doctors who read articles on the site about it. And, since a real live university sponsored the deal, the medicine looked legit.

Industry funding of continuing medical education should be phased out to avoid conflicts, and Congress should require full disclosure of all industry payments for continuing medical education.

Phasing out industry funding of CME means phasing out CME, at least as we’ve come to know it.

“In terms of identity, I think one has a sense of being roughly the same set of thoughts as one was yesterday. Of a continuum of observation. But you give yourself your own character by telling yourself stories, don’t you, really?”

… [Various childhood events] contributed to the framework of his writing, in which the need to understand the world is held in tension with the comic hopelessness of doing so.

… “I had a sharper sense of death in middle age than I now have. I think that’s common to all of us. When your parents die, when your father dies, when a friend or two dies, what you had known all along comes home; that this will happen to you too. When you get to be older, it is something that ceases to worry you so much somehow.”

… [W]hen we talk about the distinction between writing journalism and plays, Frayn suggests that all of it comes from the same place, from the pressing need to sense a shape and a pattern in the rush and surprise of experience.

“All journalists have to be acutely aware of that process, but we all are really. What do you tell your friends when you meet, what do you tell your wife when you get home at night? It’s all stories, something that will catch the interest.” …

UD learned this lesson rather late in life.

Well into their teens, she and her older sister, Barbara, would say the name Moise Tshombe together, the Moise very soft and then, explosively, TSHOmbe, and laugh hysterically.

But then, when La Kid was seven or so, UD encountered, in one of her books, Chrysanthemum the mouse. People make fun of Chrysanthemum’s name until one day her dance teacher, admired by all, discloses that her name is Delphinium Twinkle, and she’s proud of it. After that, people stop making fun of Chrysanthemum.

And yet… isn’t it true that even when you’ve learned this lesson, certain names and titles arise that make it difficult to contain your laughter?

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I’m not talking about grossly ridiculous names intended to make you laugh, like Incontinentia Buttocks and Biggus Dickus. I mean real names and titles.

For instance — while the name Dr. P. “Som” Somasundaran isn’t particularly funny (It’s one of many long foreign names that Americans decide they can’t handle, and so they take the first syllable and make that a nickname. The long-name-as-funny thing only works if the name is insanely long, as in the Simpsons character, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon.), “Som”s title is, I think, funny. “Som” is La von Duddleson Krumb Professor, Director Langmuir Center for Colloids & Interfaces, Director National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Advanced Studies in Novel Surfactants at Columbia University.

La von Duddleson Krumb is a funny name. Go ahead and tell me it’s not.

And then there’s the insanely long tripartite title itself: Professor, Director, Director again… and then if you’re not so exhausted that you haven’t given up, you get to teeny little whimpering Columbia University at the end…

The underlying joke principle here I guess is that in going to amazing extremes to impress you with the amazingness of his titled amazingness, “Som” has accomplished the opposite of his intention.

I mean, you know she likes a good hoax if you’ve been reading University Diaries for awhile and following her happy, excited coverage of hoaxes of all kinds, but mainly literary hoaxes.

There’s even a case study featuring UD in the soon-to-be-issued Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders update. Look for her under H, for hoaxophilia.

But while UD revels in the details of hoax writing and in statements from hoaxers like James Frey who’ve been found out, she’s disgusted by the thought of actually spending any time with the douchebags.

Thanks to the miracle of tv, however, we can wile away hours (use while away if you prefer) listening to hoaxers talk about what they’ve done, deny that they’ve done it, embellish their lies, etc., etc.

As I say, I can’t imagine doing this myself, but if you’re into it, you can spend a long evening with one of the most notorious hoaxers of all, Norma Khouri, who wrote a best-selling, searing memoir about her wretched life in Jordan. All of it lies.

Just get hold of Anna Broinowski’s film, Forbidden Lies. An Australian tv critic prepares us:

In addition to dozens of errors about Islam and life in Jordan, Dalia [the main wretched person] did not exist, there was no honour killing as she described, Khouri hadn’t lived in Jordan when she said she did and she hadn’t fled the country when, she says, her life became endangered for daring to tell her friend’s story.

In fact, she’d been living for years in Chicago with her husband and two children. The story was broken by Malcolm Knox, literary editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, and it won him a Walkley award. But the really big story was yet to be revealed.

Anna Broinowski’s film is an ambitious and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to get to the bottom of Khouri’s web of claims and counter-claims. Despite evidence that seems to prove Khouri’s deceit, she manages to worm and squirm and reshape her version of events at every turn so that it’s impossible to pin her down.

Well, what sort of hoaxer would she be if she couldn’t do that?

PowerPoint in England, from The Times:

Bertan Budak, [a student at Durham University, says]: “Lecturers are not interesting while teaching in class because they only say things rather than teaching. A lecturer spends more of lecturing time concentrating on PowerPoint presentations rather than focusing on the students.”

From the article’s comment thread:

A common tale amongst many graduates, myself included. A few weeks into the second year I realised… lectures will always be a case of reiterating bullet points on the PowerPoint presentation…

For the latter half of my uni education I, along with many of my classmates, brought in other material so we spent the time wisely, instead of listening to a balding guy repeating what was said on the screen.

… as everyone outside, and almost everyone inside, schools of education knows. This blog has followed the sickening absurdities of professional organizations like NCATE (scroll past the first post, and read the subsequent ones),  designed to dismiss intelligent, independent-minded people from the profession, but there’s so much more to be said about the deadheads running the show.

Some of it gets said in the pages of the New York Times today by a variety of observers.  Excerpts:

Nothing shows how downright phony the game is than the Ed.D.s — the Doctors of Education. I have seen administrators who have had trouble writing clear letters home to parents and who murdered the English language in public go about brandishing their degrees and insisting on being called “Doctor.” On the other hand, the two best principals in my high school — T.C. Williams in Alexandria, Va. — never bothered to get “doctorate” degrees; in fact, one did not even have a master’s when he was first hired. Both were appointed by wise superintendents who knew natural leaders when they saw them.

The credentialing game is even worse when it comes to teachers, because bureaucrats, obsessed with rules and numbers, would rather hire a mediocre but “fully certified” prospect than the brightest, most promising applicant who lacked the “education” courses.

[W]hat we have now [is] a charade that confuses taking mind-numbing education courses with being a “highly qualified” teacher and has ended up filling schools with tenured mediocrity the kids don’t deserve.

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This system lacks quality control and too often encourages universities to offer quick, low quality graduate programs in order to attract those teachers who may be more interested in salary bumps than professional development.

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A master’s degree in most subfields in education (especially reading — or what they like to call “literacy” — early childhood education, teaching and elementary education) adds little or nothing to students’ knowledge or practical skills.

Indeed, a master’s degree in most education subfields further stamps in the “progressive,” “child-centered,” “constructivist,” “developmentally appropriate,” postmodernist, pseudo-liberationist baloney that infects the undergraduate curriculum, and which leaves graduating ed students unprepared to provide their own students with coherent, logically sequenced instruction.

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… which knows an important trend when it sees one.

UD will let the citizens of Minnesota do the talking on the subject of their big beautiful new university football stadium and its money problems.

They express themselves on the comment thread of a recent Pioneer Press article. That’s one of the citizens up there, in my headline.

First you need to know the latest on the University of Minnesota’s TCF Bank Stadium, the cost-overrun, unnecessary stadium that was going to bring in all sorts of revenue for the university.

For those who don’t click to the article, the deal is that because they can’t serve booze, the university’s not selling its luxury boxes.

You will need a few drinks after a couple seasons of watching the Gophers play football. Heck who am I kidding? You need to be smashed right now just to stand em.

[The team it’s all for, the Gophers, suck.]

Does it hurt not to drink for a couple of hours? Poor little football jocks can’t have a beer whaaaa whaaaa whaaaa.

[This guy doesn’t understand that the luxury boxes are bought by corporations plying potential clients with alcohol. No ply, no play.]

So … seats aren’t selling, the place is hemorrhaging taxpayer money and bleeding whatever educational mission might be left at the university.

It’s not so much that drunks must have their football. If it’s going to pay for itself, football must have its drunks.

Excerpts from a Minnesota Public Radio conversation about this:

Murray Sperber: The breathalyzer’s a good idea…. [The stadium will have mandatory breathalyzer tests at the gate for students who have been drunk at games before… What? Why the tests and security cameras everywhere etc. etc. if the stadium will be alcohol free? Are you really asking that question??? LOL.] I’ve been appalled by the behavior of young drunk male students… It’s dangerous… I’ve never understood why universities don’t control tailgating… It’s on their land… Part of the reason is they don’t want to piss off alumni… Many of these people tailgating and drinking are not in fact alumni; they’re local fans of the team… The schools can’t unburden themselves from bigtime university sports and the various myths that say they’re helping the university.

Toben Nelson: Division I football games are drinking events… Alumni are a major barrier to making any serious changes to alcohol policy on campus…

“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.

From UD‘s friend Bill at The Periodic Table — a link to an editorial in the Minnesota Star-Tribune excoriating the University of Minnesota for ineptitude and indifference in regard to conflict of interest among its professors.

How is it possible to assess a conflict of interest, much less manage it, if [university] officials don’t know how much money is involved?

Grassley’s letter about COI to the university was “embarrassing,” writes the Strib.

Things at UM are going to get worse before they get better. UD thinks they should start stockpiling anti-embarrassment pills.

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Oh. The quotation in my headline, taken from the Strib editorial, is from Arthur Caplan, the country’s best-known medical ethicist.

After the Pitino anomaly, things are back to normal.