http://thepeopleschemist.com/how-big-pharma-lies-to-doctors-about-the-medicine-you-are-taking/
Following doctor’s orders has become synonymous with danger. In my book,
Over-The-Counter Natural Cures, I documented that every year, FDA- approved drugs kill twice as many people as the total number of U.S. deaths from the Vietnam War. Death by medicine flourishes because deceit, not science, governs a doctor’s prescribing habits.
Working as a pharmaceutical chemist, I learned that the deceit comes in many forms. Medical ghostwriting and checkbook ‘science’ are the most prominent.
Doctors rely on peer-reviewed medical journals to learn about prescription drugs. These journals include the
Lancet, British Medical Journal, New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association. It’s assumed that these professional journals offer the hard science behind any given drug. This assumption is wrong. Thanks to medical ghost-writing, medical journals can’t be trusted.
Medical ghostwriting is the practice of hiring Ph.D.s to crank out drug reports that hype benefits while hiding negative side effects. Once complete, drug companies recruit doctors to put their name on the report as the authors. These reports are then published in the above mentioned medical journals. The carrot for this deceitful practice is money and prestige. Ghostwriters can receive up to $20,000 per report. Doctors receive prestige from having been published.
As deplorable as medical ghostwriting sounds, it is more common than you think. Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, editor for the
New England Journal of Medicine, insists that he cannot find drug review authors who do not have financial ties to drug companies. Dr. David Healy, of the University of Wales, predicts that 50% of the journals drug review articles are written by ghostwriters hired by Big Pharma.
The editor of the British Journal of Medicine has acknowledged that medical ghostwriting has become a serious problem for his publication: “We are being hoodwinked by the drug companies. The articles come in with doctors’ names on them and we often find some of them have little or no idea about what they have written.”
Consider the testimony from deputy editor of the
Journal of the American Medical Association: “This [journal articles] is all about bypassing science. Medicine is becoming a sort of Cloud Cuckoo Land, where doctors don’t know what papers they can trust in the journals, and the public doesn’t want to believe.”
Confessions of Ghostwriters
Ex-medical ghostwriter Susanna Rees stated:
“Medical writing agencies go to great lengths to disguise the fact that the papers they ghostwrite and submit to journals and conferences are ghostwritten on behalf of pharmaceutical companies and not by the named authors,’ she wrote. ‘There is a relatively high success rate for ghostwritten submissions ─ not outstanding, but consistent.”4
Other ghostwriters have come forward privately:
Ghostwriter 1
“I agreed to do two reviews for a supplement to appear under the names of respected ‘authors.’ I was given an outline, references, and a list of drug-company approved phrases. I was asked to sign an agreement stating that I would not disclose anything about the project. I was pressured to rework my drafts to position the product more favorably.”
Ghostwriter 2
“I was told exactly what the drug company expected and given explicit instructions about what to play up and what to play down.”
More at link.
