Wyeth Should Be More Forthcoming with Authorship Disclosures

As much as I defend the industry I work in, I have to talk about things that we do that I don't think are so defensible. Another one of those has come up thanks to the New York Times and PLoS Medicine, who obtained a pile of records from a current court case.

This article has the details. Wyeth (WYE) seems to have contracted with a medical writing outfit (DesignWrite) to produce and place a number of review articles covering hormone therapy for menopausal women. (Wyeth, of course, was the main player in that market.) The articles seem to have been entirely written by the staff at DesignWrite - authors are listed as "TBD", and then academics were recruited to serve as lead authors and to submit the papers to journals.

No mention was ever made in the published papers of the medical writing group's role, nor of Wyeth's (who were paying them for this service). As far as the readers could see, these were the standard sorts of review articles that show up in the medical literature all the time. And that's the part that bothers me. For all I know, these articles were reasonable reviews of the field - I'm no great expert in the field, so I can't judge if they're truly fair summaries. But even if they are, the readership of a journal is entitled to know that a drug company was the impetus behind them, and they're also most certainly entitled to know the actual authors (as opposed to the people who would appear to have been the authors, but just signed off on the stuff).

I think that drug companies are entitled to promote their products. But full disclosure should be the the standard to try to reach in any market: put it all out on the table, and let physicians make their own decisions. It doesn't help, not one bit, to get papers into the journals this way - because when a company goes to such lengths to hide its participation, it almost looks as if it has something to hide..

Comments

[Terence Young:]

Come on. Wyeth 'seems to have contracted"? .."Seems to have been written?" You make this sound like little rascals playing pranks, instead of one of the worlds largest companies committing fraud to increase profist while putting women at risk. If you took an hour or two to investigate you'd find that drug company funded research and 'articles' always exaggerate the benefits of their drugs over the risks, putting patients at risk to increase profits. This is indefensible. Anyone who acts as an apologist for this malignant behavior is part of the problem. You sound like you just got off the turnip truck. Everyone knows about ghost writing is common and corrupt except you. The same thing that would get any medcial student kicked out of medical school is common practise with big pharma. Here's an idea: do some research on how many women conrcated cancer after using HRT, and these guys keep pushing it on women.

Aug 07 05:35 PM