Merck Created Phony Peer-Review Medical Journal 213
Hugh Pickens writes "Don't believe everything you read on the internet is a good rule to follow, but it turns out that you can't even believe a 'peer reviewed scientific journal' as details emerge that drug manufacturer Merck created a phony, but real sounding, peer-review journal titled the 'Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine' to publish data favorable to its products. 'What's sad is that I'm sure many a primary care physician was given literature from Merck that said, "As published in Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, Fosamax outperforms all other medications...."' writes Summer Johnson in a post on the website of the American Journal of Bioethics. One Australian rheumatologist named Peter Brooks who served as an 'honorary advisory board' to the journal didn't receive a single paper for peer-review in his entire time on the board, but it didn't bother him because he apparently knew the journal did not receive original submissions of research. All this is probably not too surprising in light of Merck's difficulties with Vioxx, the once $2.5 billion a year drug that was pulled from the market in September 2004, after a study showed it doubled the risk of heart attack and stroke in long-term users resulting in payments by Merck of $4.85 billion to settle personal injury claims from former users, but it bears repeating that 'if physicians would not lend their names or pens to these efforts, and publishers would not offer their presses, these publications could not exist.'"
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Revolting! (Score:2, Interesting)
They should be run out of town for this. Sadly I see nothing major happening to them.
Other stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
My father, who is a psychiatrist, was looking over a medical journal one day and showed me an article where some researcher---in a study funded by one of the drug companies, I forget which one---had determined that whatever SSRI the company was peddling was effective against bipolar disorder. This had been a six-week trial.
I didn't understand. My father explained to me that yes, SSRIs tend to be effective as short-term treatment for bipolar disorder, but that over the long term, they actually can make bipolar symptoms worse. So the study was cherry-picked: deceptive, because what is good in the short term can be bad in the long term. Many bipolar people get put on antidepressants, which are counterproductive. And doctors often go along with it, because the drug companies have been intentionally misleading them in publications.
Re:Misleading or Deceptive Conduct (Score:5, Interesting)
People need to be informed of the other kinds of 'jobs' that the companies they do business with perform. It will help them make rational decisions about who they want to do business with. Where they want to get their books published, where they want to get their colon checked, who they want to buy their drugs from, you know, that sort of thing.
Unfortunately, people do not like it to be known that they are in the side business of helping kill random strangers. It tends to put a damper on business. So we have governments and courts. But the word never seems to get out to enough people, and it is just ever so easy to ignore the deaths of random strangers. They are just a statistic connected at one remove to the publisher of a fake journal.
Suppose I am a publisher. Suppose I take a job from the mafia, to print and put up a bunch of fliers offering $10,000 for your nut sack, JordanL? And suppose your nut sack is delivered to the mafia, should I be partially liable for your loss?
Fosomax is crazy stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
Fosomax is a crazy drug, it stops bone turnover and in some cases has lead to patients having to have their jaw bone removed. That's nasty!
"""
Raisor was told her jaw bone was going to end up in a bucket. "They took some out, took some out, kept taking more out," Raisor said.
They tried to save what they could. They used a metal plate for reinforcement.
It didn't work.
"""
http://www.wave3.com/Global/story.asp?S=4911501&nav=0RZF [wave3.com]
Re:I sense a serious hand-slapping in Merck's futu (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Forgive my language (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
So far for the need for peer-review (Score:2, Interesting)
I am ashamed to be a researcher.
Scientific journals are built on reliability and reputation, if they are willing to squander it for a few extra bucks, the entire peer-review process is dead, and modern scientific advancement with it.
Re:Misleading or Deceptive Conduct (Score:5, Interesting)
The Case of El Naschie (Elsevier) (Score:4, Interesting)
Sadly, the blog that was initially involved in this, and where the 'riddle' was solved, seems to have removed the entire blog post + comments (lawyers?), but the posts can still be found here [blogspot.com]
Re:Misleading or Deceptive Conduct (Score:3, Interesting)
you would think he would know better? (Score:1, Interesting)
according to this: http://www.uq.edu.au/uqresearchers/researcher/brookspm.html Peter Brooks is the Executive Dean of Health Sciences at The University of Queensland, scary
Elsevier is more to blame than Merck (Score:5, Interesting)
It is not particularly outrageous in itself that a drug manufacturer should collect a few papers that report favourable data on its products, bundle them with a few adverts and some marketing materials, and hand them out at conferences and trade shows. This happens all the time and it does little harm because you know who the sponsor is, and of course that you should not expect full objectivity.
The problem is in the disguise: Elsevier, a respectable publisher of scientific journals, apparently has a side business "Excerpta Medica", which states on its website that "Excerpta Medica Helps Pharma Companies Fulfill 2009 Pharma Guidelines with Elsevierâ(TM)s Physician and Patient Educational Content." In other words, Excerpta Medica is a marketing organisation that serves pharmaceutical companies. It seems highly unwise for a large scientific publisher to run a side business of this nature, which screams "conflict of interest" pretty loud.
The moral figleaf is provided by the "2009 Pharma Guidelines", issued by the PhRMA. However, the PhRMA is essentially a lobby organization for the pharmaceutical companies. Being a lobbyist is not necessarily evil, and no doubt self-regulation can be a good thing, but nevertheless this figleaf is a bit too small to cover Elsevier's shame: Essentially Excerpta Medica is vowing to obey the moral standards defined by its own customers!
The selling point, of course, is obvious: Elsevier holds copyrights to a vast amount of scientific publications, both journals and books, so it can churn out impressive compilations on demand. Or, as they put it on their website "we can leverage the resources of the worldâ(TM)s largest medical and scientific publisher."
We can only hope that most of these publications will have been peer-reviewed earlier, but Excerpta's website also makes it clear that "authors take full responsibility for the content of their manuscripts" and the editor of the publication is "an outside expert". In other words, Elsevier lends it good name to promotional materials, but declines responsibility for their content.
Re:Does it ever work? (Score:4, Interesting)
You are SERIOUSLY overestimating the value of medicine.
Many of the most significant advances in medical science over the past 100 years has to do with a better understanding of nutrition and hygiene. The fact is, "we know better" than to each much of the crap we eat which often leads to sicknesses we wouldn't otherwise get. Quite a few medicines suppress or weaken your immune system as well.
Yes, there are times in life when medications are necessary, I won't deny it. But those times are actually quite rare. But you can't build a huge industry on rare. We already know what Merck and companies like them are prepared to do in order to sell more drugs to people, so it wouldn't be stupid to look into your own medicine cabinet to see what you don't actually need.
Aspirin is good medicine. Nothing has completely replaced it. They will sell you a lot of more advanced things, but aspirin is good and it's "inferior." Quite often things are sold as newer or superior when it is actually quite the same as the thing before it but with a new combination of components or manufacturing process and most importantly, "A New Patent!" Be careful about that.
I have found that from the time I have become more aware of what I put into my body, the more healthy I have become. Eating less, eating less junk food, drinking less soda and the like are some pretty obvious ones, and are also the ones quite a few people lack the will-power to cut down on in the first place. But you could easily dig deeper into the rabbit hole -- for example, "high fructose corn syrup" is responsible for a lot of pancreatic disorders in people... a little won't hurt you, but when it's in everything you eat? Adult animals don't naturally drink milk -- it's for babies. So why do humans think they "need" it? We know why, we just don't think to question if it's true.
Prevention is truly the best way to play this game. But from the government on down, no one wants to talk about prevention when they talk about the healthcare system.
Re:Misleading or Deceptive Conduct (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, ask any librarian who has to deal with Elsevier Science about their opinion. Elsevier is the Microsoft of the scientific press. Elsevier charges subscribers as much as they can afford, completely unrelated to the costs related to producing the journal. Typically, they will start a new journal, get some reputable professors to participate in the editorial board. If the journal has enough papers that are being cited, Elsevier increases the subscription price, knowing that a university that does research in the particular niche that the journal covers must have a subscription regardless of the price.
A while ago, I did a price comparison of a couple of journals. The (non-profit) American Physical Society publishes the reputable Physical Review journals (A-E and Letters). An institutional subscription (up to 500 people or so) costs about €0,10 per page IIRC. (There are quite a few pages per year, though) Science and Nature, published by for-profit companies, charge significantly more, I think around €0,60 per page. One of the more reputable Elsevier journals, Chemical Physics Letters, costs €2 per page! That means that a journal that has 5000 pages per year sets you back by 10 k per year. And those prices for Elsevier tend to increase every year.
It doesn't surprise me in the least that Elsevier would do something unethical that makes them money. If you're a scientist and considering to publish papers, avoid citing papers published in Elsevier journals and don't publish there yourself.
Re:Misleading or Deceptive Conduct (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/623042/description#description [elsevier.com]
Re:Forgive my language (Score:4, Interesting)
Hoax! (Score:3, Interesting)
There is not a single reference to this "journal" in the entire citeseer database. The query
on Google returns no reference to such a "journal" from before this scandal broke.
This sounds like a fabrication of the quacks! Does anyone have any real evidence that such a fake journal ever existed?
Re:Does it ever work? (Score:3, Interesting)
So precisely what is it we eat that causes arthritis (the most common indication for Vioxx)?
Aspirin is good. But it has negative effects, like promoting ulcers, particularly with long-term use. It also has a dose-response relationship for pain relief which levels off, though the side-effects continue to get worse. And it's a fairly short-acting medication. The COX-2 inhibitors relieve pain better, for longer, with fewer gastrointestinal side effects. They also slightly increase the chance of heart attack, which is why most of them got banned, but IMO that's a foolish trade of quantity of life for quality of life.
Re:I sense a serious hand-slapping in Merck's futu (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:That's why you have Impact Factor (Score:3, Interesting)
This is exactly what the original google algorithm was using: number of times someone found an information useful / reliable as a measure of how relevant / important / interesting this information is
Just had to correct a few things. Google's original algorithm is a variant of what is sometimes called an eigenvalue problem [wikipedia.org]. It's not quite the "number of times someone found an information useful" -- rather, it analyzes the linking patterns between webpages in terms of a recursive-sounding definition: "an important page links to other important pages".
In science, there is an ongoing attempt to reform the use of impact factors [wikipedia.org], which are easily abused. Check out well-formed eigenfactor [eigenfactor.org] as an example.
Re:Forgive my language (Score:3, Interesting)
People can be bought - period. This makes systems of political checks and balances incompletely, because wealth is power, power corrupts, and economic power is most other forms of power spring from.
This is why I am absolutely in favor of redistribution of wealth.
So to avoid the corrupting effects of power you are in favour of giving some individuals vastly more power than they have now, to forcibly redistribute wealth?
Personally, I'm in favour of legal and tax frameworks whose policy goal is to produce flatter wealth distributions, and in favour of putting a tax-payer-funded floor under the poorest people, but wholesale redistribution necessarily involves some individuals (and it is ALWAYS individuals) having far too much power over other individuals for anyone to be safe.
You are correct that power corrupts. The power to redistribute wealth on a large scale corrupts absolutely.
Textbooks written by GlaxoSmithKline (Score:2, Interesting)