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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13715

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

Kamerow D.
Who wrote that article?
BMJ 2008 May 3; 336:(7651):989
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/336/7651/989


Abstract:

Authorship issues are a common obsession of medical journal editors. We fuss about them a great deal, fretting about who contributed what to a paper, who was responsible for the work and its conclusions, and what should qualify a contributor to assume the august title of “author.” The quantity and, to a lesser extent, the quality of authored publications have a lot to do with who gets promoted in academia, who gets tenured, and who gets jobs at prestigious universities. So naturally there is a great desire among academics to get their names on as many papers as possible, preferably at the head of the (often lengthy) list of authors…

The stakes are raised substantially, though, when the drug industry becomes involved. In support of their products, drug companies sponsor carefully orchestrated campaigns to pass off sympathetic, if not biased, research and review articles as the work of academic scientists rather than of their own or contracted employees. Ghost authorship takes on a new meaning when health communication companies write papers on contract, recruit prestigious authors for them, and then disappear from view…

Keywords:
MeSH Terms: Authorship* Drug Industry Interprofessional Relations Periodicals as Topic*

 

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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