The article written below by a retired neurosurgeon is excellent in its entirety, but I wanted to highlight the fraudulent material the pharmaceutical companies are having written to promote their new drugs and how this material is used by doctors to prescribe them to patients. Modern day white coats are just too compromised to trust anymore unless they are cognizant of the corruption and capable of maneuvering through the landmines in modern medical literature.
We are now witnessing a growing number of excellent scientific papers, written by top experts in the field, being retracted from major medical and scientific journals weeks, months and even years after publication. A careful review indicates that in far too many instances the authors dared question accepted dogma by the controllers of scientific publications—especially concerning the safety, alternative treatments or efficacy of vaccines.[ 12 , 63 ] These journals rely on extensive adverting by pharmaceutical companies for their revenue. Several instances have occurred where powerful pharmaceutical companies exerted their influence on owners of these journals to remove articles that in any way question these companies’ products.[ 13 , 34 , 35 ]
Worse still is the actual designing of medical articles for promoting drugs and pharmaceutical products that involve fake studies, so-called ghostwritten articles.[ 49 , 64 ] Richard Horton is quoted by the Guardian as saying “journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”[ 13 , 63 ] Proven fraudulent “ghostwritten” articles sponsored by pharmaceutical giants have appeared regularly in top clinical journals, such as JAMA, and New England Journal of Medicine—never to be removed despite proven scientific abuse and manipulation of data.[ 49 , 63 ]
Ghostwritten articles involve using planning companies whose job it is to design articles containing manipulated data to support a pharmaceutical product and then have these articles accepted by high-impact clinical journals, that is, the journals most likely to affect clinical decision making of doctors. Further, they supply doctors in clinical practice with free reprints of these manipulated articles. The Guardian found 250 companies engaged in this ghostwriting business. The final step in designing these articles for publication in the most prestigious journals is to recruit well recognized medical experts from prestigious institutions, to add their name to these articles. These recruited medical authors are either paid upon agreeing to add their name to these pre- written articles or they do so for the prestige of having their name on an article in a prestigious medical journal.[ 11 ]
Of vital importance is the observation by experts in the field of medical publishing that nothing has been done to stop this abuse. Medical ethicists have lamented that because of this widespread practice “you can’t trust anything.” While some journals insist on disclosure information, most doctors reading these articles ignore this information or excuse it and several journals make disclosure more difficult by requiring the reader to find the disclosure statements at another location. Many journals do not police such statements and omissions by authors are common and without punishment.