3 ms·

Here is a way to bribe journals, by purchasing large quantities of "reprints": http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2012/07/03/richard-smith-medical-journals-a-gaggle-of-g

• DanBC 14y ago
  Elsevier have done some dodgy things in the past, such as printing fake journals which appeared to be peer reviewed but not disclosing sponsorship. (http://classic.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/27383 http://classic.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/27...) Pharmaceutical companies used to spend vast amounts promoting their medications to English GPs. (Estimates suggest over £10,000 per GP, with 40,000 GPs in England.) And, because of our tight regulation that sum was probably less than in the rest of Europe. I'm pretty sure that has now stopped. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3700513 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3700513) > And anyone with an ounce of brains should be very cautious about drugs. Bob is taken to hospital. Bob is unconscious. Or Bob has a learning disability. Or Bob is going through psychiatric crisis. Or Bob speaks a different language than all the clinicians. Or Bob is under the influence of drugs / alcohol. Or Bob is not that bright. I agree that people should be careful with medication, but it's a shame that we have to do so. I trust doctors, and I sort of trust pharma (I wish there was better regulation), but I'm still wary of meds. (In the UK about 10,000 people die each year because clinicians make mistakes with medications. Compare that figure to Road Traffic Accidents (about 3,000))
• Alex3917 14y ago
  This is one of the things I chose to leave out of my massive post before, but since you mention it: "According to the editor of the British Medical Journal, Dr. Richard Smith, 'The major journals try to counterbalance the might of the pharmaceutical industry, but it is an unequal battle -- not least because the journals themselves profit from publishing studies funded by the industry.' The journals benefit from the publicity gained from publishing large drug company-sponsored studies. This increases the value of their advertising and enables them to sell back to the drug companies reprints of articles, which the drug companies then distribute as marketing tools to doctors. According to Dr. Smith, this can amount to more than $1 million for a single article. At the same time that medical journals are given incentives to please the drug companies, they are also given strong disincentives to go against drug company interests. According to Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor of NEJM, editors of medical journals exercise self-censorship -- trying to avoid offending their chief advertisers, the drug companies. Dr. Robert Fletcher learned about this firsthand. In 1992, he was editor of the Annals of Internal Medicine when it published an article reporting that 44 percent of drug ads in medical journals were written in a way that would lead doctors with no other source of information to prescribe improperly. The article also reported that 92 percent of those ads were in some violation of FDA rules. Writing in The Lancet in 2003, Dr. Fletcher said that as punishment for publishing this article, the pharmaceutical industry 'withdrew many adverts' and showed that it was 'willing to flex its considerable muscles when it felt its interests were threatened.' This is a price that medical journal editors would prefer not to pay." Source: Overdosed America, p. 113