Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17630

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: Electronic Source

Edwards J
Inside Pfizer's Ghostwriting Shop: Friendly Drug Studies for Just $1,000
BNet 2010 Apr 16
http://industry.bnet.com/pharma/10007740/inside-pfizers-ghostwriting-shop-friendly-drug-studies-for-just-1000/

Notes:

For full text and graphics see http://industry.bnet.com/pharma/10007740/inside-pfizers-ghostwriting-shop-friendly-drug-studies-for-just-1000

Full text:

How much does it cost to hire a respected academic to slap his name on a friendly drug-study report? At Parke-Davis, later acquired by Pfizer (PFE), managers paid academics $1,000 per paper, according to a document released in litigation over the company’s Neurontin anticonvulsant. That seems pretty cheap, but of course the supposed author isn’t doing a whole lot for the money.

Most companies have sworn off the practice of writing “research” papers for doctors and then paying them to add their names as authors even when they had little involvement or the results were trivial. Merck (MRK), Forest Labs (FRX), and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) have all been caught doing it.

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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