… “It is self-evidently absurd to look to a company for information about a product it makes,” Dr. Marcia Angell of Harvard Medical School and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, said in a telephone interview.

“Why can’t doctors, who are among the most privileged members of society, pay for their own continuing medical education?” Angell said. “Why have they abdicated that responsibility to the companies who make drugs?”

Reuters updates us on the continuing scandal of Continuing Medical Education.

“Ghosted” medical school professors – researchers who allow themselves to be named as authors of studies which are in fact all, or in part, written by ghost-writing agencies in the pay of drug firms promoting certain pills and devices – are a dime a dozen.

But not all ghosted – or in various other ways pharma-compromised – professors are created equal. When they come from our most respected universities – Harvard, Duke, Penn, Stanford – they lift a merely scummy underhanded practice all the way up to a national disgrace.

Professors are themselves of course reluctant to talk about the practice. In his withering response to Brown University professor Peter Kramer’s recent effort to defend antidepressants, Felix Salmon notes that Kramer

…takes care not to even mention part two of [Marcia] Angell’s two-part [New York Review of Books] series, where she talks at length about how psychiatry has been captured by drug companies, who “are particularly eager to win over faculty psychiatrists at prestigious academic medical centers”. (After reading Angell’s second essay, you’ll certainly wonder why Kramer doesn’t disclose how much income he gets from pharmaceutical companies.)

One of these prestigious medical centers, and the president of its university, has just hit all the papers.

[It is alleged that] five psychiatrists allowed their names to be appended to a manuscript that was drafted by medical communications company Scientific Therapeutics Information, hired by SmithKline Beecham, now GlaxoSmithKline. The paper [reportedly] misrepresented information from a research study on the antidepressant drug Paxil.

The manuscript published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2001, and cited many times since, suggested that Paxil may be beneficial in the treatment of bipolar depression, without acknowledging the medical communication company’s contribution or the extent of GSK’s involvement.

If any of the claims are true, it’s a really icky case: The complainant, a University of Pennsylvania professor who, along with colleagues, was involved in the research and writing of the paper, even claims that “the ghostwriting firm, Scientific Therapeutics Information in Springfield, N.J., chose [one researcher] as the paper’s first author and that Glaxo then decided to replace him with [Charles] Nemeroff.” [Background on Nemeroff here.]

Eeny meeny miny mo, who’s the biggest pharma ho? Ghost company offers one candidate; pharma co. another… Meanwhile, where are the actual, like, professors of medicine who supposedly wrote this shit? Sitting on their asses, directing their secretaries to add another ghost-written article to their hundreds and hundreds of ghost-written or guest-written articles…

Since this scandal largely involves the University of Pennsylvania, one would expect at least a word or two from its president, Amy Gutmann – especially since she chairs President Obama’s bioethics commission. Rather than traveling to Washington and generalizing about good and evil in the world of science, Gutmann should stay home, release a statement about this situation, and investigate the troubling ethical matters in her own backyard.

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Many more details here, including the shameful non-involvement of some authors of the study, and the undisclosed pharma affiliation of others.