Medical Journal Fake News
Okay, this one is really scary to me. It’s beyond me being critical and sarcastic. I am embarrassed for our system because as a physician I rely on keeping up to date from medical journals. It is being reported that:
- Nearly two-thirds of medical research in the US is paid for by drug firms who could have a financial stake in the outcomes
- Several of the top medical journals have been found to be raking in millions of dollars from pharmaceutical companies through kickbacks and reprinting fees
- The journal for the American Medical Association gets 52 percent of its revenue from reprinting studies by pharmaceutical companies
- Editors at the journal of the American College of Cardiology received $15 million in kickbacks from drug firms
Am I surprised? Actually I am a little. I knew the AMA was a sell out but 52%? There needs to be a massive enema given to the medical journal system to clean this crap out. We should demand it. Where are the ethics for these editors? How do they sleep at night? I am beyond disturbed at this.
I feel guilty selling t-shirts and books but I think I am transparent. Links attached, LOL. This, however, is ridiculous.
What do you think?
The tell of bad journalism is absence of balance. This is a classic example. A quick review of the rest of the content of the Daily Mail reveals it to be a rather tawdry clickbait machine.
I know from personal experience that premier journals such as JAMA and NEJM struggle mightily to maintain editorial integrity while maintaining a viable financial model.
As you know better than most (RIP Placebo Journal) publishing sans major ad support is challenging.
The status quo is a compromise between editorial integrity and financial reality. Disclosure certainly helps.
But the perception of bias alone has created a crisis in journal readership in particular and CME in general that may threaten patient care.
There is a clear need to separate the wheat from the chaff beyond the current citation based methodology. Stay tuned.
You should NOT feel guilty about selling t-shirts and books. You are helping people tremendously with your books, and provide A LOT of fun and “wellness” with your t-shirts.
Editorial physicians should not be allowed to have financial conflicts to drug companies, instrument companies, etc.
This has been a plan in the works for twenty years, at least. Whoever controls the information, controls the thinking.
Medical schools have slid backwards from the Flexner days 100 years ago, from attempting to form clinician-scientists who reason out their actions with a blend of experience and basic scientific principles; back to the days before Flexner, where people sat through endless hours of didactic teaching, with little practical experience. If you have the podium when teaching the new providers, you can tell them anything. Remember our approach to pain management taught in the late ’90’s that “pain is exactly as severe as the patient says it is?” I experienced the pounding of that message into my head, over and over. At the time, I was a new provider – what did I have to say to disagree? Now we are being thrashed for practicing that which we were indoctrinated with.
And we are given “guidelines,” AKA mandates, to practice medicine in a precise way – the way precisely dictated by the Ivory Tower Clinicians. Whoever owns the publication rights on the guidelines, owns the market.
Corporations, and no surprise to it, own the generation of “facts.” I cannot hold them accountable. Corporations are not people. They exist to maximize their cash flow. They are as amoral as a hangman’s noose. “Go one, one size fits all!”
In addition to today’s appalling facts that Doug offers, there’s also a critical fact we may not consider. Almost every publication is behind an expensive firewall, open to, well, big money subscribers like the corporations and universities! All that the average peon can afford is access to the free abstract. And if you’ve become familiar with the medical literature, you know that authors can stuff any sort of rubbish in the abstract that conflicts with the rest of the paper, without a murmur out of the reviewers, because the guts of the paper is the fitting of results to conclusions. Considering how sloppy the medical publication industry is in regards to prevarication and veracity – stuff gets into medical literature that would be rejected, and set afire with shrieks, in the basic science literature – all we get to see is propaganda from the authors. And the authors, of course, are as objective as the journal publishers are. (see above.)
It makes politics look honorable.
God forbid we would receive a pen or notepad from a drug company….