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Excellent article on the problem I have been talking about for years!! Whenever anyone had a question about serotonin I would tell them to look up older research done before the SSRIs hit the market.
Why? It was clear to me that the truth was not being printed because what we were reading about serotonin was the exact opposite of what all the research in the three previous decades. It was certainly clear to me that someone was trying hard to sell us on a new group of drugs without valid research.
Now, thanks to David Healy and a few others, who still know what the word “integrity” means, we have the documentation that this is indeed what is happening to a very great extent. With one half of journal articles being ghostwritten, where is the FDA? Why are we putting up with all this? These lies kill and they are killing more by the minute.
Dr. Ann Blake Tracy, Executive Director, International Coalition For Drug Awareness& author of Prozac: Panacea or Pandora? - Our Serotonin Nightmare& tape on safe withdrawal “Help! I Can’t Get Off My Antidepressant!”
Order Number: 1-800-280-0730 Website: www.drugawareness.org
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“In the United States a legal case brought against drug firm Pfizer turned up internal company documents showing that it employed a New York medical writing agency. One document analyses articles about the anti-depressant Zoloft. Some of the articles lacked only one thing: a doctor’s name. In the margin the agency had put the initials TBD, which Healy assumes means ‘to be determined’.
Dr Richard Smith, editor of the British Journal of Medicine, admitted ghostwriting was a ‘very big problem’ .
‘We are being hoodwinked by the drug companies. The articles come in with doctors’ names on them and we often find some of them have little or no idea about what they have written,’ he said.
Hundreds of articles in medical journals claiming to be written by academics or doctors have been penned by ghostwriters in the pay of drug companies, an Observer inquiry reveals. The journals, bibles of the profession, have huge influence on which drugs doctors prescribe and the treatment hospitals provide. But The Observer has uncovered evidence that many articles written by so-called independent academics may have been penned by writers working for agencies which receive huge sums from drug companies to plug their products.
Estimates suggest that almost half of all articles published in journals are by ghostwriters.
While doctors who have put their names to the papers can be paid handsomely for ‘lending’ their reputations, the ghostwriters remain hidden. They, and the involvement of the pharmaceutical firms, are rarely revealed.
These papers endorsing certain drugs are paraded in front of GPs as independent research to persuade them to prescribe the drugs. ... Few within the industry are brave enough to break cover. However, Susanna Rees, an editorial assistant with a medical writing agency until 2002, was so concerned about what she witnessed that she posted a letter on the British Medical Journal website.
‘Medical writing agencies go to great lengths to disguise the fact that the papers they ghostwrite and submit to journals and conferences are ghostwritten on behalf of pharmaceutical companies and not by the named authors,’ she wrote. ‘There is a relatively high success rate for ghostwritten submissions - not outstanding, but consistent.’
Rees said part of her job had been to ensure that any article that was submitted electronically would give no clues as to the origin of the research. ... One field where ghostwriting is becoming an increasing problem is psychiatry.
Dr David Healy, of the University of Wales, was doing research on the possible dangers of anti-depressants, when a drug manufacturer’s representative emailed him with an offer of help.
The email, seen by The Observer, said: ‘In order to reduce your workload to a minimum, we have had our ghostwriter produce a first draft based on your published work. I attach it here.’
The article was a 12-page review paper ready to be presented at an forthcoming conference. Healy’s name appeared as the sole author, even though he had never seen a single word of it before. But he was unhappy with the glowing review of the drug in question, so he suggested some changes.
The company replied, saying he had missed some ‘commercially important’ points. In the end, the ghostwritten paper appeared at the conference and in a psychiatric journal in its original form - under another doctor’s name.
Healy says such deception is becoming more frequent. ‘I believe 50 per cent of articles on drugs in the major medical journals are not written in a way that the average person would expect them to be... the evidence I have seen would suggest there are grounds to think a significant proportion of the articles in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, the British Medical Journal and the Lancet may be written with help from medical writing agencies,’ he said. ‘They are no more than infomercials paid for by drug firms.’
In the United States a legal case brought against drug firm Pfizer turned up internal company documents showing that it employed a New York medical writing agency. One document analyses articles about the anti-depressant Zoloft. Some of the articles lacked only one thing: a doctor’s name. In the margin the agency had put the initials TBD, which Healy assumes means ‘to be determined’.
Dr Richard Smith, editor of the British Journal of Medicine, admitted ghostwriting was a ‘very big problem’ .
‘We are being hoodwinked by the drug companies. The articles come in with doctors’ names on them and we often find some of them have little or no idea about what they have written,’ he said.
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