Ghostwriting in Medical Literature: The Senator Charles Grassley Report

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VIA PharmaGossip:

VIA pdf, Grassley:Ghostwriting in Medical literature

"In 2005, the Senate Committee on Finance (Committee) initiated an inquiry into
educational grants for continuing medical education (CME) programs. This inquiry began after reports that drug companies were using the grants to promote off-label uses of their drugs, i.e.,uses that had not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The findings of that inquiry were released in a Committee staff report in April 2007.1 The Committee’s inquiry revealed that the pharmaceutical industry spent more than a billion dollars a year to fund CME programs.

Since releasing that report, Ranking Member Charles Grassley expanded his inquiries
into the financial relationships between drug and device companies and academic physicians and scientists. These financial relationships include payments to physicians and scientists for consulting services, speaking engagements, and research activities. Senator Grassley also examined the policies and reporting practices at over a dozen medical schools in the United States and found that the medical schools have not adequately monitored the outside income of their researchers and faculty.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) relies on an institution to report and manage its faculty members’ conflicts of interest in order to maintain the integrity of federal funding for biomedical research.

However, Senator Grassley found cases where there were vast disparities between the amounts of payments leading physicians and scientists received from drug companies and the amounts they reported to their institutions.

Senator Grassley’s inquiries led to the introduction of the bipartisan Physician Payments

Sunshine Act, which he co-authored with Senator Herb Kohl. This bill was incorporated into the recently passed health care reform legislation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,2 which was signed into law by President Obama on March 23, 2010.

Beginning in March 2013,drug, device, and biologics manufacturers will be required to report annually payments they made to physicians nationwide.

About two years ago, Senator Grassley inquired about an industry practice to get articles published in major medical journals touting the benefits of a company’s product without public disclosure that the company initiated and paid for the development of the articles.

Specifically,Senator Grassley wrote to Merck & Co., Inc. (Merck) and Scientific Therapeutics Information (STI), a medical publishing company, following the publication of a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).3 In that study the authors examined Merck’s manipulation of scientific literature through ghost writers to market the painkiller Vioxx.

Notably, based on their review of court documents the authors of the JAMA article concluded that “review manuscripts were often prepared by unacknowledged authors and subsequently

1 Committee Staff Report to the Chairman and Ranking Member, Use of Educational Grants by Pharmaceutical

Manufacturers, S. Prt. 110-21, April 2007, available at
http://finance.senate.gov/newsroom/chairman/release/?id=af4af834-3fab-4293-be6d-ca7f1246484f.
2 Pub. L. No. 111-148, § 6002 (2010).
3 Merck removed Vioxx from the market in 2004 because of cardiovascular risks.
2
attributed authorship to a academically affiliated investigators who often did"

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Do you love music?

Many musicians hire "Ghostwriters" to complete, or write or score the entire album(track, song et al), if the person is in rehab, or other life situations. the person who "ghosted" the album does not receive PRINT acknowledgement: they receive $$$$ for their work, remaining in the background, only known by listeners/people "in the know".

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Ghostwriting in medical literature

Is dangerous. This is not a song and dance routine. Profit is to be made by the drug company.

"Ghostwritten articles can have a significant impact on, among other things, physician prescribing practices. When prominent physicians and scientists lend their names to an article, it raises the credibility of the findings and conclusions presented.

This, in turn, can affect the pocketbook of the American taxpayer since Medicare and Medicaid pay billions of dollars for prescription drugs. In addition, manipulation of medical literature could lead physicians to prescribe drugs that are more costly or may even harm patients."
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Lessons in Medical Ghostwritings

Given to me via:

Dr. Aubrey Blumsohn

Dr.Aubrey Blumsohn,Scientific Misconduct.

Mind Hacks :

Psychiatrist denounces own ghostwritten article as 'crap'.
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