The Vioxx case in the Federal Court in Melbourne continues to produce a stream of interesting and illuminating revelations although I had to chuckle at one specialist’s efforts to downplay his profession’s skills in marketing. “I would have thought getting medical practitioners to be marketers would have been the death knell of a product because doctors are not very good at marketing,” he said.
Sounds like a case of excessive modesty – even a quick scan of the Crikey Register of Influence shows that many medicos are very willing and able when it comes to marketing. Looking at the bigger picture, there’s a strong argument that modern medicine has done such a good job of marketing itself that we as a society are now paying far more than we ought to be for many treatments and procedures whose benefits have been oversold.
But I digress. The point of this post is to alert you to an interesting story at this science blog. Someone enterprising there has done some digging post the Federal Court revelations about industry-funding of journals.
The story begins: “Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did not disclose sponsorship, the company has admitted. Elsevier is conducting an “internal review” of its publishing practices after allegations came to light that the company produced a pharmaceutical company-funded publication in the early 2000s without disclosing that the “journal” was corporate sponsored”.”
It’s definitely worth reading the entire post, and there are quite a few interesting comments as well. The credibility of scientific publishing has taken a hit.
I did an epidemiological study (12 years of one state’s hospital admissions and several years of PBS data) of the likely effects of prescription of both Vioxx and Celebrex on admissions for congestive heart failure and similar diagnoses a few months before the adverse findings on Vioxx appeared in the media. However, my work was poo-pooed by someone in my own workplace who had apparently been paid (I discovered later) by Merck to show that Vioxx’s introduction significantly lowered hospital admissions for gastrointestinal bleeding. There was a clear increase in the slope of the correlation between time and number of admissions, starting when Vioxx and then Celebrex were placed on the PBS/RPBS. Of course I couldn’t show cause, but they were the only drugs any reasonable researcher at the time might suspect could increase the load on a failing heart. The work was approved by a top cardiologist with whom I was working at the time, but I was never allowed to publish anything on the topic. How much more of this sort of work by junior researchers never sees the light of day?