Comments on: Ghost Writers Coming Out of the Closet

By: 10 Great Investigative Blogs on Healthcare

10 Great Investigative Blogs on Healthcare — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:25:19 +0000

[...] Make sure to see his recent article on ghost-writing in medical research. [...]

By: Amy Philo

Amy Philo — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 04:06:49 +0000

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…

By: Doug Bremner

Doug Bremner — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 13:41:24 +0000

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: JBZ

JBZ — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 10:10:22 +0000

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: JBZ

JBZ — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 09:36:55 +0000

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: Doug Bremner

Doug Bremner — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 02:25:42 +0000

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: Anonymous4

Anonymous4 — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 02:03:11 +0000

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?