Med School Profs As Drug Company Lackeys
What a cesspool. I mean the dirty work medical school professors do for drug companies. The profs make the drugs appear better than they are. Let me count the ways:
1. I blogged earlier about Duke professor Charles “Disgraced” Nemeroff taking huge amounts of money — which he then failed to disclose — to encourage doctors to give dangerous poorly-tested drugs to children. Nemeroff is (or at least was) considered a top psychiatry professor!
2. When the practice of drug companies ghostwriting articles for professors was revealed, New York University professor of obstetrics and gynecology Lila Nachtigall, the nominal author of a ghostwritten article, told a reporter (contrary to evidence supplied by Wyeth) that she had written all of her 1000 articles and 3 books. And she said this:
If they [Wyeth] came up with the idea or gave me an outline or something, I don’t remember that at all. It kind of makes me laugh that with what goes on in the Senate, the senator’s worried that something’s ghostwritten. I mean, give me a break.
It made her laugh. Yes, why should anyone care about the dishonesty of med school professors? What cave has Nachtigall been living in?
3. About half of published clinical trials were not properly registered, a new study showed (abstract here). A large fraction of these studies were drug-company-funded, I’m sure. (More than half were “industry” funded.) And the authors were often med school professors. Failure to register your study means you can distort the results to make them closer to the outcome you prefer by changing the “endpoint” (the dimension you use to measure whether the drug worked). Even among the registered studies, one-third used a different endpoint than the registration said. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that a lot of misleading results — making drugs look better than they really are — are being published. The level of cheating appears to be incredibly high — perhaps more than half of published papers.
September 10th, 2009 at 6:51 am
I know one psychopharmacologist at UCLA who stopped taking drug company money to fund his research. He said it was too difficult to maintain his scientific objectivity when they kept pressing him for certain results and progress. If only more medical scientists could do the same, but alas the lure of money is probably too much for many people to overcome. I guess they’d rather give up (or change) their ethics instead.
September 10th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Aaron, that’s a good example.
September 11th, 2009 at 6:33 am
[…] New York University professor of obstetrics and gynecology Lila Nachtigall, whom I mentioned recently, said nice things about estrogen replacement therapy to a Newsday reporter. The story fails to say that she gets money and ghostwriting from Wyeth, which makes the pill used in that therapy. […]
September 12th, 2009 at 7:27 am
[…] It was recently estimated that 46% of treatments have unknown effectiveness. There are all kinds of ways that treatments might look more effective in research publications than they really. See here, here and here for a few examples. This suggests to me that we are probably spending way too much on useless treatments. Based largely on the RAND experiment, Robin Hanson argued that medical spending could be cut in half. The RAND experiment found that people randomized to the full health coverage group spent 40% more on health care, but did not have better outcomes. While variations in health care spending do not seem to explain differences in outcomes, other types of variations do (lifestyle, environment). Phillip Longman has a very interesting essay on the topic: A child born today can expect to live a full 30 years longer than one born in 1900. Improvements in medicine, however, played a surprisingly small role in this achievement. Public health experts agree that it contributed no more than five of those 30 years.This may seem counterintuitive given the attention society pays to medical breakthroughs. But the changes in living and working conditions over the last century are the real reason. American cities at the turn of the last century stank of coal dust, manure, and rotting garbage. Most people still used latrines and outhouses. As recently as 1913, industrial accidents killed 23,000 Americans annually. Milk and meat were often spoiled; the water supply untreated. Trichinellosis, a dangerous parasite found in meat, infected 16 percent of the population, while food-borne bacteria such as salmonella, clostridium, and staphylococcus killed millions, especially children, 10 percent of whom died before their first birthday. […]