Details Emerge About Ghost-Written Medical Articles for Wyeth
Posted Aug 07 2009 11:58am
There appears to be few limits on what some pharmaceutical companies have been willing to attempt to influence the drug-prescribing habits of physicians. One company created a phony medical journal from scratch (see: Merck Creates Phony Peer-Reviewed Medical Journal to Dupe Physicians ). We now learn some of the details about how another company commissioned a review article by a medical communications company and then used an academic physician as the lead author. This news appeared in the New York Times with details about how this was accomplished (see: Medical Papers by Ghostwriters Pushed Therapy ). Below is an excerpt from the article:
Newly unveiled court documents show that ghostwriters paid by a pharmaceutical company played a major role in producing 26 scientific papers backing the use of hormone replacement therapy in women, suggesting that the level of hidden industry influence on medical literature is broader than previously known....In 1997, for example, DesignWrite, a medical communications company in Princeton, N.J., proposed to Wyeth a two-year plan that would include the preparation of about 30 articles for publication in medical journals.... Sometime in 2003, a DesignWrite employee wrote a 14-page outline of the article; the author was listed as “TBD” — to be decided. In July 2003, DesignWrite sent the outline to Dr. Gloria Bachmann, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J. Dr. Bachmann responded in an e-mail message to DesignWrite: “Outline is excellent as written.” In September 2003, DesignWrite e-mailed Dr. Bachmann the first draft of the article. She also pronounced that “excellent” and added, “I only had one correction which I highlighted in red.” The article, a nearly verbatim copy of the DesignWrite draft, appeared in 2005 in The Journal of Reproductive Medicine, with Dr. Bachmann listed as the primary author. It described hormone drugs as the “gold standard” for treating hot flashes and was less enthusiastic about other therapies. The acknowledgments thanked several medical writers for their “editorial assistance,” not disclosing that those writers worked for DesignWrite, which charged Wyeth $25,000 to generate the article. Dr. Bachmann, who has 30 years of research and clinical experience in menopause, said she played a major role in the publication by lending her expertise. Her e-mail messages do not reflect contributions she may have made during phone calls and in-person meetings, she said. “There was a need for a review article and I said ‘Yes, I will review the draft and make sure it is accurate,’ ” Dr. Bachmann said in an interview Tuesday. “This is my work, this is what I believe, this is reflective of my view.”
It's not clear from the article how much compensation Dr. Bachmann received for allowing her name to be used in this way and/or in consulting fees from Wyeth. Interestingly enough, she indicates that the use of hormone replacement was "reflective" of her view of practice. I suspect that this is a true but somewhat irrelevant in terms of the issues at hand. It appears that she had little to do with the article for which she was credited as the lead author except to review the initial outline and subsequent drafts. This was certainly one facet of the problem. The second facet was that the employees of DesignWrite, who appear to have written the entire piece, were said to have been provided "editorial assistance." Hopefully, this case, and others like it, will cause medical journal editors to pay more attention to the authorship of all articles but particularly those where pharmaceutical companies may be working in the shadows. At the very least, we need a crisper definition for what constitutes primary authorship of an article. Is it sufficient to only review the work of other unspecified parties?
There appears to be few limits on what some pharmaceutical companies have been willing to attempt to influence the drug-prescribing habits of physicians. One company created a phony medical journal from scratch (see: Merck Creates Phony Peer-Reviewed Medical Journal to Dupe Physicians ). We now learn some of the details about how another company commissioned a review article by a medical communications company and then used an academic physician as the lead author. This news appeared in the New York Times with details about how this was accomplished (see: Medical Papers by Ghostwriters Pushed Therapy ). Below is an excerpt from the article:
It's not clear from the article how much compensation Dr. Bachmann received for allowing her name to be used in this way and/or in consulting fees from Wyeth. Interestingly enough, she indicates that the use of hormone replacement was "reflective" of her view of practice. I suspect that this is a true but somewhat irrelevant in terms of the issues at hand. It appears that she had little to do with the article for which she was credited as the lead author except to review the initial outline and subsequent drafts. This was certainly one facet of the problem. The second facet was that the employees of DesignWrite, who appear to have written the entire piece, were said to have been provided "editorial assistance." Hopefully, this case, and others like it, will cause medical journal editors to pay more attention to the authorship of all articles but particularly those where pharmaceutical companies may be working in the shadows. At the very least, we need a crisper definition for what constitutes primary authorship of an article. Is it sufficient to only review the work of other unspecified parties?