Healthy Skepticism Library item: 9

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: news

Promotion disguised as research
The Gazette 2003 Dec 2

Full text:

However rampant plagiarism might be at the undergraduate level, we like to believe medical researchers take credit mainly where credit is due.

Certainly we expect them to remain resistant to – if not altogether isolated from – the interests of the pharmaceutical industry.

Now it is alleged some scientists are willing to accept academic papers prepared for them by pharmaceutical companies and submit these to journals, or read them at conferences, as their own.

This rewards both parties: The fraudulent researcher appears to be hard at work, while a shellac of scientific credibility is applied to a paper that is in essence product promotion.

It would be nice if the source of this claim were a figure less controversial than David Healy, a British psychiatrist whose sweeping condemnations of Prozac, Paxil and other popular medications have made him not only an enemy of Big Pharma but an irritant to scientists committed to the careful assessment of new drugs. Still, editors at reputable journals concede manufacturers are more eager than ever to feed information to researchers.

All this will sound familiar to newspaper and magazine editors who receive – and perhaps do not always disregard – hefty press kits extolling the virtues or this product or or that travel destination.

Such “background material” might well include an article requiring only a byline to pass as an independent report.

This is bad enough, and reputable newspapers – including this one – don’t do it. But there is real a difference in public impact between upbeat copy about a holiday resort and “research” that is in fact provided by the maker of a new drug. Approval agencies such as Health Canada depend on independent science to validate new products as effective and safe.

To maintain the integrity of this process is vital not only to public welfare but to the public purse. Only last week, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study that found no difference in effect between Haldol, an old and cheap anti-psychotic, and Zyprexa, a costly newcomer. Zyprexa sales brought the Eli Lilly company returns of $223 million last year in Canada alone.

Pharmaceutical companies behave aggressively because the stakes are high. They should remember independent verification remains the best promotion.

Health Canada can do its bit by compiling and distributing unbiased reports. At the same time, professional associations need to make it clear to their members passing off promotional material as independent research is nothing less than fraud.