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.
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.
Aaron, that’s a good example.