Ghost Writers Coming Out of the Closet

Aug 25 2009

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”.

Tags: Columbia University

Filed in Healthcare Politics, pharmaceutical industry | Doug Bremner

7 Comments

By Anonymous4, August 25, 2009 @ 9:03 pm

Hooray for PLOS Medicine.
Boo for our sociopathic colleagues who have figured out this “system” of self-promotion and aggrandizement.
Befuddled and unsure what I can believe about anything in medical journals.
Sad for all the female patients who have been confused and bewildered by conflicting and obviously rigged research.
Time for academic medicine to value more than just publishing or perishing.
Wondering how academic medicine will survive when the pharmco bribery stops. Who will teach all the doctors we will need in the near future?

How the hell did anyone ever come up with the idea of using pregnant mare urine hormones in humans, anyway?
By Doug Bremner, August 25, 2009 @ 9:25 pm

I’ve got my lectures ready to go to teach future drs of america. They can just ask me. And I can give names of others.
By JBZ, August 26, 2009 @ 4:36 am

Thumbs up for PLOS medicine for bringing to light this shady side of scientific writhing. I think ghostwriting in medical science is a very hazardous phenomenon primarily because it’s very effective in doing where it is intended for, namely influencing prescribing habits of MD’s. The reason why ghostwriting is such an influential tool imo is this: Not al (that’s a euphemism) MD’s keep themselves up to date on their fields scientific literature. A substantial part of MD’s, when they are reading scientific articles, look at the journal name and author to make an assessment of the credibility of the article. So before even reading the article (or in most cases only the abstract) some MD’s have already made a judgment of the article. The ghostwriting scandals learn us that pharma is taking advantage of this. When the MD, after reading the abstract, decides to read the whole article (which only happens in the minority of cases, check out this handy tool on the site of frontiers of neuroscience http://www.frontiersin.org/OverallAnalytic/) they don’t take the required time to check out the methodology and statistics in the article. Therefore not the data itself but the way of presenting it sticks. Positively present data is where ghostwriters excel. The next problem is that the few who do critically take a look at the data (thank goodness for peoples like Mr. and Mrs. Bremner;)) and decide to comment on the article don’t always get their comment published. And when the comment is published most of time there’s considerable time delay between the initial publication and the placement of the comments (take DB and others comments on the Zoloft article published in the NEJM for example). So the link between the comment and the article is not very easy to make.
So how do we challenge this threat to scientific writhing? The first thing what came to my mind was to make an appeal to al the pear reviewers to look more critically at these kinds of articles. But to be honest, I don’t think we can expect too much of them because a substantial part of the peer reviewers is also corrupted by big PHARMA $/€. So at this moment I agree with the recommendations of PLOS, for journals to make clear guidelines on what’s acceptable and what’s not. And there must be clear (financial) penalty’s for those who do lend themselves out. I propose as a penalty, for those “scientist” who put their name on a paper in which they didn’t have a share, to ad a word or symbol to there name. So when you for example look them up on PubMed of WOS you will see the following: Timothy Kuklo MD (Donk/Fraud)
By JBZ, August 26, 2009 @ 5:10 am

Another matter of great concern is the relative silence the last weeks/months around the DSM5 shadow team;). Hopefully this great initiative is still going strong! Because November 5-7 2009 ISTSS conference on the DSM5 is coming up. So can we expect JDB and his brothers/sisters in arms to take on Darrel Regier (vice pres. of the DSM5 in crowd) at this event? I know that fellow shadow member Bessel van de Kolk will be present and it’s held in Atlanta (that’s a kind of a home game) so hopefully there will also be some fireworks by Mr. Bremner himself!:)
By Doug Bremner, August 26, 2009 @ 8:41 am

Yes we have a symposium on trauma-related psychiatric disorders I will be speaking in, chaired I think by Eric Vermetten. I do have to admit I felt a little bit beat up/ostracized after my DSM shadow team posts which culminated in my photoshopping the anxiety disorders committee as sheep being herded off of a cliff by David Kupfer (see DSM Shadow Team under categories in side bar) and after being abandoned by the original “team”. But we do have a couple of papers in the works including a response to Giesbecht et al on trauma and dissociation (which in the end I had to write by myself after getting “fired” by my co-authors). But thanks for the encouragement and good to see that some support critical debates in academia rather than pandering to the status quo.
By Amy Philo, August 30, 2009 @ 11:06 pm

Pure laziness and selfishness on the part of the docs who allowed their names to be used for this. Makes you wonder about almost everything you read…