Healthy Skepticism Library item: 1672

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Publication type: news

Boseley. S
'It said the drug was the best thing since sliced bread. I don't think it is'.
The Guardian. 2002 Feb 7
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/feb/07/research.health

Full text:

David Healy, director of the north Wales department of psychological
medicine, was approached by a communications agency working for Pierre
Fabre, makers of the antidepressant milnacipran.

They invited him to speak at a company-sponsored symposium on the new drug
at a European College of Neuropsychopharmacology meeting in September 1999
and produce a paper from his talk. The papers were to be
published in a supplement to the International Journal of Psychiatry in
Clinical Practice, which is edited by Siegfried Kasper and David Baldwin.
“In order to reduce your workload to a minimum we have had our ghostwriters
produce a first draft based on your published work,” the email from the
company said.

The draft was based on Dr Healy’s past work and included references to his
papers, but he preferred to write his own article and submitted that to the
agency. The agency’s response, a month later, was that it
would be a pity to alter Dr Healy’s own article but that they needed “to
bring across one or two points that are not accentuated in your manuscript.”

They had decided, they said, to publish Dr Healy’s article separately in the
supplement. But the original, ghostwritten article which contained what they
described as “the main commercially important points” was to be there too.
“Siegfried Kasper has kindly agreed to author this one,” they said. The name
of Professor Kasper of the University of Vienna, editor of the journal, duly
appeared on the
unaltered, published article, complete with the original references to Dr
Healy’s work. Professor Kasper told the Guardian that he was happy with the
content of the article.

A second approach was made to Dr Healy by a senior academic at the Centre
for Addiction and Mental Health at the University of Toronto. Dr Healy was
invited to speak at a symposium and author a paper on an
antidepressant called venlafaxine, made by Wyeth.

In the past few years, it has been recognised within psychiatry that while
“wonder drugs” like Prozac take the edge off depression, they do not bring
about a cure. Wyeth claims that venlafaxine can.

On January 1 2001, Dr Healy and his colleague Richard Tranter were sent an
email containing “the first draft of your article by a medical writer from
an agency which was organising the supplement which would follow Wyeth’s
symposium. They were invited to “feel free to edit it in any way you
choose.”

Dr Healy and Dr Tranter made some changes, pointing out that studies of a
similar drug called mirtazapine did not support the message Wyeth wanted to
give and that other studies showed that antidepressants could
make some people worse, even suicidal.

In June, when the finished manuscript arrived in the post, it had been, says
Dr Healy, “significantly altered”. And a sentence had been added, saying
that venlafaxine “may induce full remission in a greater number of
patients”. Dr Healy took strong exception to this statement.
“That last sentence said that Wyeth’s drug was the best thing since sliced
bread,” said Dr Healy. “I would never have said that because I don’t think
it is.”

He found that the pro-Wyeth line had been inserted by the senior academic in
Toronto who had helped set up the symposium for Wyeth. Dr Healy removed his
name from the article.