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"The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) played a considerable part in manufacturing media outrage last month over an article revealing Merck's use of ghostwriters and rubber stamp experts in the preparation of clinical research articles on Vioxx (rofecoxib). Although the JAMA article (299, 1800-1812, 2008) revealed nothing new about the ghostwriting practice and so-called guest authorship, the JAMA editors nevertheless felt moved to introduce a new, stricter set of policies on authorship and conflicts of interest."
Here's the complete editorial from Nature:
Click Here to Download
And here's how the editors of Nature conclude their essay:
"But the editors of JAMA and other journals would do well to focus on content, not process. JAMA's attack casts a cloud over the entire industry. Stigmatizing any paper that comes from the private sector on the basis of an analysis of one company's poor publishing practices over five years ago is not only unjustified, it is discrimination pure and simple."
Now comes word from the exec producer of the Infinite Mind that Lenzer pitched a segment about so-called hidden corporate ties in reporting, which was rejected, before running the Slate piece.
"....In the interest of full disclosure, I also should note for the record that Lenzer, who co-authored the Slate article, called me a few days after the "Prozac Nation: Revisited" program aired to pitch a program that she wanted us to do for The Infinite Mind, called "Journalists on Prozac," which would feature her and her writing partner Shannon Brownlee. Checking into Lenzer's credentials, I found a troubling article in The New York Times taking her to task for a British Medical Journal article that suggested that Eli Lilly and Company, which makes Prozac, had concealed documents about the link between anti-depressants, suicide and violence. The BMJ subsequently retracted the article, with full apologies, and the whole matter was widely covered in the news media.
After we told Jeanne Lenzer that we would not be proceeding with a program featuring her, she and Brownlee wrote the article for Slate." fray.slate.com/discuss/forums/thread/1237086.aspx
(Lichtenstein also notes that he did not ask Peter about his working for Manning, Selvage and Lee. Which is true. But then again, Peter had mentioned it to the producer for the segment in the context of noting that nothing he does for MSL involves CMPI and vice versa.)
On another front, and speaking of fronts, the Prescription Project has released “Toolkits to Guide Hospitals and Medical Schools with Conflicts of Interest”
The guides follow the same flow as the recommendations coming out of the AAMC taskforce. .
From the titles of the tool kit modules along with the recommendations in the tool kit it appears that they had significant time to digest the AAMC recommendations and take them several steps further to advance their cause (this to be expected). www.policymed.com/2008/04/aamc-and-prescr.html
You can see where this is heading ultimately. Small bites at private sector innovation until nothing is left.
Ah, the rites of spring! Baseball, cherry blossoms and the annual report of the Medicare trustees, who duly report that Medicare is going broke. Yet each year we have the routine response of politicians and pundits who wring their hands about the unsustainable rate of growth in health care expenditures.
Here's a typical comment: "Despite a massive increase in health expenditures together with a marked expansion in health workers over the past decade, the nation's health has improved less than expected. The benefits have not appeared to justify the costs. ... We have emphasized high-cost, hospital-based technologies " a situation " made all the more serious by the lack of emphasis on prevention of disease." Those observations were not made yesterday. They were made by Dr. John Knowles in a book titled "Doing Better and Feeling Worse: Health in the
It is useful to look back to see far how we have come even as some things stay the same. In 1974, cardiovascular disease was the cause of 39 percent of all deaths. Today it is about 25 percent. Cerebrovascular diseases were responsible for 11 percent of deaths back then. In 2004 they caused 6.3 percent of deaths. Kidney diseases were linked to 10.4 percent of deaths and now they are associated with 1.8 percent.
Of course, the longer people live the more likely they are to die from cancer or Alzheimer's. The percentages of deaths attributed to influenza and pneumonia have remained almost constant, as have the percentages of people dying from respiratory diseases.
As
As the genetic variations that predict our risk of disease and response to treatment are translated into tests and treatment, the waste from trial and error or unproductive intervention will fall as well. But there is a lot we can do without much effort to save money and improve health. More prevention, shifting care to lower-cost settings and rewarding people for healthier living can move us forward. That's not a crisis; that's an opportunity.
Here's a link to the complete op-ed:
Center for Medicine in the Public Interest is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization promoting innovative solutions that advance medical progress, reduce health disparities, extend life and make health care more affordable, preventive and patient-centered. CMPI also provides the public, policymakers and the media a reliable source of independent scientific analysis on issues ranging from personalized medicine, food and drug safety, health care reform and comparative effectiveness.
