Pharma companies publish fake medical journal

YogaChick

I found this to be very unethical behavior. I wonder if these types of practices are widespread?


http://blog.bioethics.net/2009/05/merck-makes-phony-peerreview-journal/

norrie rugger

YogaChick wrote: »

I found this to be very unethical behavior. I wonder if these types of practices are widespread?


http://blog.bioethics.net/2009/05/merck-makes-phony-peerreview-journal/

It is very unethical, much like the homeopaths and their outlandish claims to cure everything.

DrIndy

Christ almighty!

That is a travesty and as Norrie Rugger says - as bad as homeopathy and other non-peer reviewed alternative medicine sites.

What is even more galling though is the history of Merkk and the apparent inability to learn from their mistakes.

Merkk suppressed data on Vioxx (rofecoxib) regarding its side effect profile and resulted in a huge class action lawsuit in america against them. They are still up to these ridiculous antics!

Hope they get taken to the cleaners.

I hope to hell its not widespread - anyone any comments (please with evidence).

Note - this will not turn into a grand-pan-pharma-industry-conspiracy thread.

tallaght01

Did they claim it was per reviewed?

nesf

tallaght01 wrote: »

Did they claim it was per reviewed?

Even if they didn't it's pretty clear that it was intended to ape as one in advertising literature. Though the thread title is quite misleading tbh.

AtomicHorror

I gather that this is something of a first. Though it's a rather odd development, it's hard to see how it will impact on us lot. It might make the primary literature that bit more daunting for the layperson however. It would be good to see Pubmed or Google Scholar take the step of barring non-peer-reviewed journals so the likes of this simply doesn't come up in their searches. Will be watching how this develops with interest.

tallaght01

I'm not arguing that they're not doing anything wrong. But if they haven't claimed that it's something it's not then technically they've done nothing wrong.

It does act as a reminder to us all that we need to actually fully read articles before we make decisions based on their findings.

Traumadoc

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/360/2/103?rss=1&query=current

http://www.sacbee.com/static/weblogs/health-and-fitness/Neurontin%20Legacy.pdf

Dr Galen

I think Tallaght01 is right on the money here. No matter where I read something, be it The Lancet or The NEJM or Mystik Monkeys Journal of Medically Type Stuff, I never take it at face value. Things have to be pulled apart and critiqued fully before you'd even think about putting it into your practice.

I'm lucky that the people that I now work for have a very healthy attitude to this, and we regularly have a sit down to look at research in all fields pertaining to our area. We've also had a lot of education on how to critique fully any literature we may come across, and we've often seen something that from a business point of view would be great,when take just at face value, but when said paper gets really looked at, doesn't pass our standards, so would never get used.

Unfortunately although things have gotten a lot better, there is still a lot of nonsense out there. As medical professionals we all have a responsibility to know how to see through this smoke and do whats best for the patient

Phototoxin

It is very unethical, much like the homeopaths and their outlandish claims to cure everything.

It does you just have to make sure you strike the bottle containing the highly diluted water that 'remembers' what it was diluting exactly ten times and then the magic fairy makes it magical and it will work. Otherwise you're doing it wrong

For more info I'd read 'Bad Science' by Ben Goldacre. It's a legend of a book.

Mucco

Phototoxin wrote: »

For more info I'd read 'Bad Science' by Ben Goldacre. It's a legend of a book.

He's commented on this:
http://www.badscience.net/2009/05/elsevier-get-into-fanzines/

I have to say, that I'd never trust a journal I'd never heard of.