Medical journals: “information-laundering for Big Pharma”?

Whenever you read a medical journal article with a title like Medical Journals Are an Extension of the Marketing Arm of Pharmaceutical Companies, you know it’s a bad day for patients.

As a heart attack survivor who spends way too much of my time hanging out with cardiologists and other doctors who read these journals, I especially hate seeing this article written by a person like Dr. Robert Smith, who was himself the editor of the British Medical Journal for 25 years.*

Dr. Smith’s not alone. Consider Dr. Richard Horton of the medical journal, Lancet, who once wrote:

“Journals have devolved into information-laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”

Or how about this frank observation from Dr. Marcia Angell:

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines.

“I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”

Dr. Jerome Kassirer, another former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, argues in his book, On The Take: How Medicine’s Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health:

“The industry has deflected the moral compasses of many physicians”.

Harriet Washington is not a medical journal editor, but she is a medical ethicist and author of Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself – And the Consequences for Our Health and Our Medical Future.  She published a highly recommended American Scholar article last summer about a particularly alarming scandal in the world of medical journal publishing:

“In 2003, Elsevier, the Dutch publisher of both The Lancet and Gray’s Anatomy, sullied its pristine reputation by publishing an entire sham medical journal devoted solely to promoting Merck drugs.

“Elsevier publishes 2,000 scientific journals and 20,000 book-length works, but its Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, which looks just like a medical journal, and was described as such, was not a peer-reviewed medical journal but rather a collection of reprinted articles that Merck paid Elsevier to publish.

More here http://ethicalnag.org/2012/09/26/medical-journals-information-laundering-big-pharma/#more-9958