Plos Medicine has just release over 1500 documents which you can peruse here on ghost writing which they obtained through legal action in cases on use of hormonal replacement therapy (HRT) in post-menopausal women. You can plod through the individual Tiff files but the always useful University of California at San Francisco Drug Document archive will soon be putting them up in indexed format here so you can soon be reading about Timothy Kuklo MD and all of your other friends like the guy from Columbia who published a fraudulent article on the power of prayer for in vitro fertilization who I found on there right away.

Speaking of Columbia, their medical school seems to be putting out their fair share of turds recently, to whit the professor who was quoted in the NYT article on ghost writing for prempro that it was “too much work” to actually look up and read all of the articles required for a review paper. She of course had a ghost writer do it for her, for which she got a pay check and a free publication, which helped her get academic promotion, and more “writing” gigs presumably. I find that particularly depressing since I have written numerous reviews for which I spent hundreds of hours and did painstaking research and didn’t have someone do it for me.

I have been amazed at how many physicians continued to write about the benefits of HRT even after (as I wrote in my book, see sidebar) studies like the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) showed that they increased the risks of cancer and heart disease, rather than decrease them. Now I think I understand why, since Wyeth financed the writing of over 60 papers about HRT which they hired private “ghost writing” firms to write, and then recruited academic physicians to put their names on as authors to add prestige and credibility. It only leads me to the conclusion that my profession is filled with corrupt sociopaths and that the publishing companies who participated in this scam are part of the problem.  

Plos was able to get the judge in the HRT litigation to release these 1500 documents because he appropriately concluded that this practice was putting the public health at risk by creating a biased and at times fraudulent body of “scientific literature” that leads to misinformation.

As other bloggers have pointed out medical schools seem to have an inordinate amount of corruption and cheating. I think that is because MDs have a sense of entitlement and because so called non profit academic medical centers are really anything but. It is all driven by money, and many academic physicians use their record of publishing as a way of getting lucrative consulting and speaking gigs. Then the drug companies pay them to put their names on papers, which helps the drug companies, but also helps the academic physicians have longer publication records. Drug companies also help them make more contacts and in general become more successful so it is a win-win situation. We used to call these charmed individuals “shining lights”.