fyi, an article I received this morning..
the link at the top, and then the article.
and I've also included the cited NY times below.
Wyeth, Elsevier and Dr John Eden (Syd, Australia) all mentioned.
Jan Cornfoot
Breastfeeding Advocate
===================================================
http://www.naturalnews.com/News_000614_Wyeth_medical_journals_ghostwriting.html
Wyeth Paid Ghost Writers to Author Favorable Medical Journal Articles on its HRT Drugs
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, December 14, 2008
Key concepts: Wyeth, Medical journals and Ghostwriting
The financial collusion between Big Pharma and medical journals is even deeper and more intertwined than we suspected. Documents revealed by Sen. Charles Grassley's office show that the drug company Wyeth paid ghost writers to author medical journal articles hyping up the benefits of its HRT drug Prempro.
Sen. Grassley's office produced "dozens of pages" of internal documents showing the collusion between Wyeth and a firm called DesignWrite that earns money by producing what it calls "educational" content.
The New York Times is reporting (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/13/busin...) that one such article was published as an "Editor's Choice" feature in the May, 2003 edition of The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. That article claimed there was no link between Wyeth's drug and breast cancer, even though a federal study called the Women's Health Initiative had just concluded that, in fact, Prempro was linked to breast cancer.
Here's how the ghostwriting scam worked:
1) Drug companies would invent the titles of the articles to write and choose the medical journals in which they wanted them to appear.
2) They would draft outlines of the articles and hire a writer to create the manuscript.
3) They would then recruit a well-known academic author to put their name on the final article. This would intentionally mislead the medical journal into thinking the article was authored by an academic, not Big Pharma.
4) Finally, they would get the study pushed to a medical journal, which would publish the study.
5) During all of this, the drug company would never reveal its role in this process, keeping it secret from both the medical journal and the public.
6) Once the article is published, doctors and other members of the medical community would read it and think they were reading a, independent, scientifically-validated article that just happened to reach favorable conclusions about Big Pharma's drugs. They would never know the whole thing was schemed up by Big Pharma in the first place.
Evidence-based medicine? I'm laughing so hard it hurts...
This is now the standard of "evidence-based medicine" in our modern medical system: Ghostwritten articles, funded by the drug companies, placed into medical journals where those same companies run full-page ads touting the over-hyped benefits of the same drugs covered in the articles. Do you smell a scam?
Truth is, this practice has been going on for so long that thousands of "scientific" articles published in the medical journals have likely been authored by the drug companies themselves. If the true facts about the depth of this scientific fraud were to really come out, the medical journals would likely be revealed as gullible publishers of junk science. This is a huge scandal waiting to be uncovered...
As things stand now, nobody knows which studies were actually written by the drug companies, and the drug companies aren't talking. Neither are the medical journals. They don't want people to look into this too much, for fear of being exposed as the frauds they really are.
As it turns out, for many medical journals, the articles are the ads! They might as well just publish press releases and call them scientific fact, huh?
So much for the credibility of the medical journals (as if they had much remaining anyway). They've been duped... suckered into printing articles that were actually dreamed up and promoted by Big Pharma.
And the medical community has been suckered into believing medical journals are "scientific." As it turns out, many are no more scientific than the over-hyped claims of a television commercial! They're just framed in scientific-sounding language, which is really convincing to gullible medical professionals who believe everything they read in the medical journals, even though they're just propaganda pieces for Big Pharma.
I think the medical journals should be re-categorized in med school libraries. They should be placed under the "fiction" heading where they belong.
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Wyeth's Use of Medical Ghostwriters Questioned
By DUFF WILSON
Published: December 12, 2008
Wyeth, the pharmaceutical company, paid ghostwriters to produce medical journal articles favorable to its hormone replacement therapy Prempro, according to Congressional letters seeking more information about the company's involvement in medical ghostwriting. At least one article was published even after a federal study found the drug raised the risk of breast cancer.
From Agenda Item to Published Medical Article
A sequence of documents showing how a medical writing firm hired by Wyeth developed an academic article about hormone therapy.
The letters, sent electronically Friday by Senator Charles E. Grassley, ask Wyeth and DesignWrite, a medical writing company, to disclose payments related to the preparation of journal articles and the activities of doctors who were recruited to put their names on them for publication.
The letters are part of a continuing investigation by Mr. Grassley, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, into drug industry influence on doctors.
"Any attempt to manipulate the scientific literature, that can in turn mislead doctors to prescribe drugs that may not work and/or cause harm to their patients, is very troubling," Mr. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, wrote Friday to Wyeth's chairman and chief executive, Bernard J. Poussot.
Doug Petkus, a Wyeth spokesman, said Friday that Mr. Grassley was recycling old arguments.
"The authors of the articles in question, none of whom were paid, exercised substantive editorial control over the content of the articles and had the final say, in all respects, over the content," Mr. Petkus said.
Officials for DesignWrite, a Princeton, N.J., firm, and its parent company, JMI, a medical information company in New York, did not return multiple phone calls and e-mail messages requesting comment.
Mr. Grassley's staff on the Senate Finance Committee released dozens of pages of internal corporate documents gathered from lawsuits showing the central, previously undisclosed role of Wyeth and DesignWrite in creating articles promoting hormone therapy for menopausal women as far back as 1997.
One article was published as an "Editors' Choice" feature in May 2003 in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, more than a year after a big federal study called the Women's Health Initiative linked Wyeth's Prempro, a combination of estrogen and progestin, to breast cancer. The May 2003 article said there was "no definitive evidence" that progestin caused breast cancer and added that hormone users had a better chance of surviving cancer.
At the peak of hormone therapy, in 2001, more than 126 million prescriptions for such drugs were written for women in the United States. Sales that year, primarily by Wyeth, were $3 billion. But after the federal finding, sales of the hormone drugs plummeted.
The drugs, which contain cancer warnings on the label, are still approved to treat severe symptoms of menopause, but their use is advised at only the lowest possible doses.
The documents show company executives came up with ideas for medical journal articles, titled them, drafted outlines, paid writers to draft the manuscripts, recruited academic authors and identified publications to run the articles - all without disclosing the companies' roles to journal editors or readers.
The issue of ghostwriting for medical journals has been raised in the past, involving various companies and drugs, including the Merck painkiller Vioxx, which was withdrawn in 2004 after it was linked to heart problems, and Wyeth's diet pills, Redux and Pondimin, withdrawn in 1997 after being linked to heart and lung problems.
But the documents Mr. Grassley released Friday provide a detailed look at the practice - from the conception of ideas for journal articles through the distribution of reprints.
The documents released Friday include a "publication plan tracking report" by Wyeth showing 10 articles in which manuscripts were completed by the company before they were sent to the putative author for review. Any revisions were subject to final approval from the company, according to the tracking report.
Such activities would seem to run afoul of medical journal guidelines. The World Association of Medical Editors, for example, says ghost authorship - which it defines as a substantial contribution not mentioned in the manuscript - is "dishonest and unacceptable."
Congressional investigators were given the documents about a month ago by James F. Szaller, a personal injury lawyer in Cleveland who has sued drug makers. Mr. Szaller collected the documents from court filings and made reference to some in an article he wrote last year for a law magazine, Trial.
"For the last three years, I've looked at ghostwriting at Wyeth," Mr. Szaller said in a telephone interview. "There is a mammoth amount of material. The problem is that almost all of it is still under seal."
In Friday's letter, Mr. Grassley asked Wyeth to list all scientific reports prepared for the company by DesignWrite since Jan. 1, 1995, to describe the named authors' "extent of involvement" and to disclose fees paid to DesignWrite, authors and others.
The May 2003 article supporting Prempro was signed by Dr. John Eden, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales and director of the Sydney Menopause Center in Australia. Wyeth executives suggested that Dr. Eden write such a paper in 2000, according to the documents, and had the outline and draft manuscript written for him. It was published in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology - with no mention of Wyeth or DesignWrite connections.
Thomas Reller, the director of corporate relations for Elsevier, which owns the obstetrics journal, said he had not had time yet to review the specific article cited by Mr. Grassley, but Elsevier follows strict industry standards. Dr. Eden did not return e-mail messages or calls to his listed telephone number in Sydney.
In another case, documents show, Dr. Lila E. Nachtigall, a New York University professor and director of its Women's Wellness Center, was recruited by Wyeth as author of a 1999 journal article extolling hormone treatment after the manuscript had already been drafted.
Dr. Nachtigall, reached by telephone Friday afternoon, said she had written all of the approximately 1,000 articles and three books she has had published. Asked about the Wyeth documents, she said, "If they came up with the idea or gave me an outline or something, I don't remember that at all." Dr. Nachtigall added: "It kind of makes me laugh that with what goes on in the Senate, the senator's worried that something's ghostwritten. I mean, give me a break."
More Articles in Business » A version of this article appeared in print on December 13, 2008, on page B1 of the New York edition.
The comments are here
http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2008/12/13/business/13wyeth.html
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