Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16220

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Electronic Source

Lowe D
Wyeth Should Be More Forthcoming with Authorship Disclosures
Seeking Alpha 2009 08 06
http://seekingalpha.com/article/154409-wyeth-should-be-more-forthcoming-with-authorship-disclosures

Full text:

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..