Grassley wants “ghostwriting” details from medical journals
July 9th, 2009 joshua
In his continuing search for full disclosure from the pharmaceuticals industry regarding payments it makes to professionals in exchange for much-needed scientific data, Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley has contacted eight top medical journals.
Grassley is inquiring about each journal’s policy and practice regarding ghost-written materials. Ghost-writing is often used in medical research. It is work that’s basically “signed off” by a physician but penned by another writer, or team of writers.
In recent weeks, Merck was exposed for hiring ghost-writers and even creating a fake medical journal to help promote its painkiller Vioxx. A medical journal was paraded to numerous physicians, chock-full of “peer-reviewed” research on the safety concerns over Vioxx. Little did the wooed physicians realize that much of the data was ghost-written by Merck staff and signed by a physician on-the-take from the pharmaceutical giant.
Grassley believes like many others do that these articles are appearing in other medical journals, too. The Senator contacted the editorial staff at American Journal of Medicine, the Annals of Internal Medicine, the Annual Review of Medicine, the Archives of Internal Medicine, Nature Medicine, PLoS Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and the New England Journal of Medicine in search of more answers.
Grassley is hoping to uniform the disclosure policies of pharmaceutical companies regarding payments they make to physicians and medical researchers in exchange for tangible data, promotional tours for drugs or basic endorsements on controversial products.
