Medical ghostwriting paid for by pharmaceutical company & endorsed by medical doctors
Larry Brownstein
Thursday, 06 August 2009 12:09 UTC
A recent report in the New York Times contends that court documents show that a pharmaceutical company hired ghostwriters to provide research reports about certain medical therapies. Elsevier has said it will investigate the issue since some of the articles, primarily review articles, appeared in their journals. Some doctors have allowed their names to be affixed to papers written by ghostwriting firms, the justification being that they lent their expertise. The case in question is without doubt only the tip of this particular iceberg, and this iceberg hopefully small.
While some ghostwriters may well be trained in the science they are ghosting, this is a corrupt, and corrupting, practice.
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There have been lots of news stories and comments in many publications on this particular story, and the practice in general – certainly in Nature (news and blogs), Nature Medicine and on Spoonful of Medicine blog (the blog of Nature Medicine) – but also in lots of other places: journals, newspapers and internet. I’m surprised if BMJ has been silent on the issue.
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There’s a News piece in today’s Nature on medical ghostwriting
(David – sorry, I misread your comment – you’re saying nobody has commented at the BMJ article, not that BMJ has not written about it. From what I see, people in the main prefer to comment on blogs than at journal websites.)
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well that’s not good.
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Wonderful news last night.
It seems that something will be done at last about the dreadful ghostwriting case in Sheffield which I wrote about on 2007 has at last, The case got very little attention in the mainstream media, and the suthorities were abominably slow to react, but better late than never. See report in the Guardian
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