Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13266

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

DeAngelis CD, Thornton JP.
Preserving Confidentiality in the Peer Review Process
JAMA 2008 Mar 24; 299:(16):epub ahead of print
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/299.16.jed80000

Abstract:

For the past year or so, JAMA and the Archives of Internal Medicine have been involved in litigation that significantly threatened the integrity of our peer review process. We now inform our reviewers, authors, and readers about the results of this litigation that preserve the confidentiality of our peer review process.

Pfizer Inc is a defendant in more than 3000 lawsuits across the country alleging that Pfizer advertised and marketed the cyclooxygenase 2 inhibitors celecoxib and valdecoxib as likely to provide pain relief without the adverse effects that had accompanied earlier anti-inflammatory medications. The plaintiffs contend that false representations were made to drive demand for these higher-priced prescription drugs, when lower-cost nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs would have been as safe or safer for most patients. The plaintiffs include consumers, health plan providers such as unions, and third-party payers that manage formularies and reimburse claims.

The defense attorneys for Pfizer issued subpoenas to a host of journals, but it appears the first 2 were directed at JAMA and the Archives of Internal Medicine (AIM). On May 9, 2007, Pfizer served federal court subpoenas on JAMA and AIM seeking 4 broad categories of documents and information. In response, JAMA and AIM provided copies of hundreds of pages of published articles regarding celecoxib and valdecoxib. However, the subpoenas sought all documents regarding the decision to accept or reject manuscripts, copies of rejected manuscripts, the identities of peer reviewers and the manuscripts they reviewed, and the comments by and among peer reviewers and editors regarding manuscripts, revisions, and publication decisions…

Notes:

Free full text

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts

If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Announcements

PharmedOut’s annual conference: Missing The Target: When Practitioners Harm More Than Heal

No Free Lunch is merging with Healthy Skepticism

Conference program: Pharma Knows Best? Managing Medical Knowledge

Prescrire’s proposals for France’s national conference on medicines policy

Pharmed Out Conference ‘Pharma Knows Best? Managing Medical Knowledge’

More announcements

What's new on this site

Library Home

Library Search

Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909