Slashdot Mirror
More Fake Journals From Elsevier
daemonburrito writes "Last week, we learned about Elsevier publishing a bogus journal for Merck. Now, several librarians say that they have uncovered an entire imprint of 'advertorial' publications. Excerpta Medica, a 'strategic medical communications agency,' is an Elsevier division. Along with the now infamous Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, it published a number of other 'journals.' Elsevier CEO Michael Hansen now admits that at least six fake journals were published for pharmaceutical companies."
According to their wikipeia entry, they are entirely legit.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
... not a damn thing will become of it because everyone who can do anything about it is in Merck's pocket.
I have a bad feeling that, as people start poking around, even more stories like this are going to be uncovered. Sure, Elsevier is admitting to six fake journals. What's the over/under for it being 20?
Now, I wonder if Merck makes a drug to get rid of bad feelings like this. I'll have to check an Elsevier journal to find out.
Interesting. This militates against the argument that the "imprimatur" of a publisher always adds to a journal's legitimacy, and is one more reason to ditch money-grubbing publishers for open-access journals.
That is really a huge blow to the reputation of Elsevier... of course they publish hundreds (thousands?) of journals, so in absolute terms maybe it is not that big a deal, but still...
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
The journals seem to be intended to mislead the reader into believing that research and reporting has been done which has not. Does that not constitute fraud? Would there not be an option to have the publisher and the pharmacorp charged with fraud?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It isn't probable many scientists would believe in things read in such journals. They have few impact factor points if any, aren't listed in Master Journal List, and aren't indexed in PubMed database. Thus, scientific community have means to prevent unfair publisher activity.
I was watching a panel discussion/documentary show called "Amazing Discoveries!". They were talking about great properties of the "Powersauce bar" ("A bushel of apples packed in every bar, plus a secret ingredient that unleashes the awesome power of apples!)" and the dangers of the "Vita-Peach Health Block".
But seriously, I don't see why this is so surprising. Infomercials have been around forever, masquerading as talk shows, documentaries, etc. This is just a print equivalent. I certainly wouldn't expect the fact that it happens to be on paper vice glowing phosphors to make it any more plausible, and it's clearly much easier to get away with if you own the printing press. Most infomercials have to buy time and the station posts a disclaimer. This is like also owning the TV station.
There's no reason to believe a "journal" is any more plausible or legitimate than a TV "documentary".
Brett
This is MAJOR fraud in the medical/pharmaceutical industry. Merck and Elsevier need to be shut completely down for this bullshit.
Or, alternatively, start killing off Merck and Elsevier CEOs, NOW. Send the message that we will not tolerate this misleading information.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I had often heard to avoid Elsevier publications as a place to publish.
insert inflammatory comment here!
Dr. Thomas Szasz is one doctor who comes to mind who questions this, especially with respect to psychiatry. I'm sure there are others.
No. At the very least, this gives schools a bargaining chip when negotiating journal packages with Elsevier.
Also, anything that brings the sickening relationship between doctors and pharmaceutical companies to light is a good thing. Many times, doctors will prescribe the latest (expensive) drug to a patient when a generic does the job just as well precisely because the pharmaceutical companies bombard them with this kind of semi-false information. People need to be aware of this.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Wikipedia doesn't seem so bad now, does it?
I was planning on possibly using Elsevier as a potential publisher for my book (They aren't my first choice, but they are in the list of publishers I'm going to send proposals to) Now, I'm not so sure. I wonder if the other divisions of the company are still reputable, since the TFA implies that this fraud was the work of only one division.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
WooHoo
Google seems to think elsevier is OK too (despite google's rules).
AFAIK Google has a rule where a website is not allowed to give Google's spiders a different page from what normal users would get.
I often see google search results linking to elsevier (or other journal) pages, with relevant keywords and text in them, however if you click on the link you get a page that doesn't have the same info. Such search results are not useful to me - in fact they get in the way of more useful results.
BMW got smacked down by Google for doing something similar.
No. At the very least, this gives schools a bargaining chip when negotiating journal packages with Elsevier....
There are few institutions which can or do afford all packages. Intead, they must choose one or the other. Like with the cable channels, the publishers aren't about to put all the "good" journals in one set and all the crap "journals" and advertisements in another.
Some journals and, thus, packages become must-have. And journals in the other packages become sidelined. And, because journals specialize, you get the subsequent marginalization of various topics and even fields of research.
That's on top of the veto power big business has on reearch funding. Remeber the US government may apportion grants, but since much of the money is coming from private business, it gets to select only from a subset of acceptable recipients and topics. e.g. OpenBSD: secure systems for less than the price of a cruise missile...
I equate the working of drugs for the brain much like our current understanding of gravity.
We know it works. We can reproduce it in exacting detail. We can model other experiments based upon our expectations of the way it works. But when we get down to the tiny details and questions... we have no idea exactly HOW it works.
The modern brain chemical industry is this way. Sure we know it is hitting up the "5HT" receptors but as to why that actually causes some effects in some and differing effects in others... well... uh... yeah.
--- I do not moderate.
Isn't it about time the reputable scientific journals using Elsevier as a publisher started to look elsewhere?
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Any scientist or doctor found to have knowingly written a paper making false scientific claims in a propaganda journal should lose their academic standing. Period. Ph.D? Revoked by the granting institution. M.D? Gone. Along with his or her medical license.
That's how the scientific and medical communities ought to fix this. Because when bogus science is published in medical journals, some innocent people needlessly die.
Which is easier to forgive? The jealous man who violently kills another or the man who runs a company founded for the purpose of deceiving millions of people for profit?
The deceit promoting drug makers wares often leads to the slow and painful deaths and disabilities of hundreds or thousands of people. The jealous man usually kills no more than one or two, one of which is typically himself.
The evil of the paid liars are on par with the evil of those who use technological means to spam, steal and destroy the property and lives of thousands if not millions of people. They all know what they are doing and go through great detail to do it. They are clearly and plainly aware of the consequences to others and have demonstrated that they don't care at all. A jealous man often feels remorse for what he has done.
The real crimes lie in the hearts of the criminals, not in their deeds alone.
Try to find incidents of Restless Leg Syndrome (by that name or any other) prior to the advertising campaign. See for yourself how difficult that is. Then you will see that it's not some malady that has plagued mankind over the years for which we finally have a treatment.
Having slept with someone who was tormented by this for months, I can assure you that it is quite real, whatever it is. It's possible that it was much rarer (or nonexistent) prior to 1900, but that's hardly proof that it doesn't exist now.
Your argument was going okay until you introduced this howler...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
I spent a few weeks working for them at one of their warehouses. In the employee manual there were dates for Christmas, and Christmas Eve. The dates were the 25 and 26 respectively. If they can't even get the dates for Christmas right at a text book publisher, I don't want to know what else they fail at.
You need to keep in mind that there is a fair bit of difference between the "scientific community" and "your average GP" (which is who they are targetting with these publications.)
Also, remember that the guy who is the head editor of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals has been printing his own stuff (which is crap) for something like 17 years now, and went unnoticed until last year. (See also this
It is well known among scientists that the impact factor of a scientific journal is not always a good indicator of the quality of the papers in the journal. An extreme example of this was recently uncovered in mathematics. The scandal is about one El Naschie, editor in chief of the 'scientific' journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, published by Elsevier. This is one of the highest impact factor journals in mathematics, but the quality of the papers in it is extremely poor. The journal has also published 322 papers with El Naschie as (co-)author, five of them in the latest issue.
So yes, there are ways to prevent this (in the end), but do you really want to let Elsevier get away with this behavior, especially considering they hide crap journals like this in "package deals" that you can only buy or reject wholesale? Or do you want to spend that 4500$ per journal on something more useful? Imagine how much money is lost world-wide to crap like this.
Kalkofes Mattscheibe - Amira Tampon Werbung
A skit about a Dr from the dark side of ww2 German medical experiments, trying to sell tampons in the 1950's
Almost saying human trials in concentration camps, then correcting to "laboratory camp"
This is how the world is going to think of peer reviewed US medical journals soon.
Just another creepy doctor with a past trying to sell "medical communications"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwjoAlAqkhw
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
A couple of observations:
Skeptics have throwing out a variety of reasons that open-access journals like PLoS will never work. One of those reasons is that traditional print journals have a lot of prestige, just based on their centuries of momentum. Scientists won't want to publish in upstart open-access journals, according to this argument, because nobody will take their publications seriously. Well, this scandal would seem to show that you can't trust a journal just because it comes from a centuries-old publishing house.
The other thing to understand is that the vast majority of scientific papers are crap. They're not necessarily wrong, just utterly unimportant. Although this particular scandal has to do with the obscenely corrupt drug industry as well, it's also part of a more general problem. Science is like an Easter egg hunt where there are too many kids and not enough eggs. Everybody is trying to pad their c.v. with as many papers as possible, in order to land one of those prized research jobs. Because of this, there's been a huge proliferation of small, specialized, low-quality, expensive journals, and that's been creating a lot of problems for librarians. That's the environment in which these bogus journals were able to slip in under the radar. One solution, in my opinion, is for the big research universities to practice "grad student birth control," i.e., ending the expectation that every professor will produce 20 grad students over the course of his career, each of whom will have the same academic career as their advisor. Schools should also eliminate their weaker graduate programs, e.g., if Cal State Fresno (hypothetically) has a graduate program in Italian, but it's not in the top 100 Italian programs in the U.S., maybe they should just cut it; it's not doing anyone any good for them to be handing out some tiny number of master's degrees and pretending that their faculty are doing high-powered research.
Find free books.
I am a doctor and a commenter on Slashdot for a very long time but I will not go on record because of the hit-list drug companies compile of "hostile" doctors. Don't believe me? Go Google it. It's very real and the consequences can put your practice out of business.
Even though physicians in the US are independent of drug companies, we're all affected by their tactics in one way or another. For a doctor to come out to expose the things that happen and take a stand is no different than an insider (whistleblower). Unfortunately, there is no laws to protect doctors in the US because the tactics used by drug companies cannot be audited. Slashdot and other communities need to take this to the highest levels of their local governments and push for something to be done. This is fraud and it endangers the lives of patients.
Any scientist or doctor found to have knowingly written a paper making false scientific claims in a propaganda journal should lose their academic standing. Period. Ph.D? Revoked by the granting institution. M.D? Gone. Along with his or her medical license.
That's how the scientific and medical communities ought to fix this. Because when bogus science is published in medical journals, some innocent people needlessly die.
Haven't thought that through, have you?
If the "accepted wisdom" is all that's allowed to be published, no one ever would have heard of Albert Einstein.
I used to have a great deal of respect for Elsevier Press, and have several journals published by them. Now, it seems I cannot trust anything under their imprimatur, so they have lost one person forever as a customer! Their bad!
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
There's a huge difference between publishing a legitimate paper by an unknown and an author knowingly writing falsehoods for a journal he or she knows is a sham. When academics knowingly violate standards of truth, those academics risk losing their credentials. It really does happen. Ph.Ds, M.Ds and licenses to practice are really revoked by accredited institutions and state licensing boards in certain circumstances like these.
Make an example of this academic sophistry. Yank everyone's credentials who knowingly published false information in a false academic journal. Do the world a favor.
I once borrowed an air purity analyser from a pharma company. The thing could print out reports on a little "credit card receipt" printer, and had a USB port for copying the results to a PC. The USB port was filled with silicone: not validated. So somebody was typing in the results by hand every day, because that was cheaper than validating the goddamn USB transfer. We stare us blind on the money going in R&D, but that is not where the real cost lies. The true cost is in the enormous amount of paperwork required before you can produce your first pill. And part of that cost comes from the refusal of governments to standardise requirements and cut back on the red tape. Changing a valve in a factory has to be reported to 3 different authorities. The exact same type of valve is no longer available? Poor you, that number just tendoubled. If we want to make the pharma companies play nice, we could start by letting the FDA and the EDA (european) cooperate, and say that if something is good enough for the US, it is good enough for Europe, and the other way around. After all, if the pharma companies were such a bad boys, their shares would give 100% dividend each year.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
I used to call them "Elsewhere Science". Has it turned out to be a correct description?
I've had restless legs ever since puberty. I also figured out that a banana every other day can mitigate it during warmer weather.
Oh, and it runs in my family, from both sides. My parents have both had RLS since before I was born, and long before there was ever a clinical diagnosis for it.
Take your ignorant comments and shove them up your ass.
I don't know if everyone forgets that elsevier is the biggest publisher of the world with some of the journals with highest impact factors.
This isn't fair for the scientific community that spends a lot of time and is not paid for their work, and they, also, pay for access to publications.
http://www.psyc1.com/14_curing_the_incurable.html
The surgeon was so impressed with the hypnotic treatment he arranged for himself and Mason to give a talk about the case at the highly respected Royal Society.
Mason later pointed out that had he realised exactly what he had been dealing with, a congenital skin disease, he would never have tried hypnosis, because it seems so unlikely that the mind could cure a genetic physical problem for which medicine had no solution. In a later interview he said it was as likely that hypnosis could do anything for this condition as that it could cure a club foot.
And guys like Kevin Trudeau wouldn't even have a leg to stand on.
Personally, he LOOKS shady, but then again so did Galileo when he dared to say the Earth orbits the sun.
Given how much Big Pharma hates the guy, I wouldn't be surprised if KT was actually right. Why else would a bunch of evil companies hate him so much?
The Atrophy Of Objectivity
If I were to rate the corruptive tactics performed by big pharmaceutical companies during my intimate experience with them , the frequent and intentional strategy of implementing fabricated and unreliable results of clinical trials performed by others possibly tops the list.
A list of corruptive tactics by the pharmaceutical industry that sponsors such trials. By this atrophy of the scientific method absent of authenticity that has been known to occur, harm and damage is possibly done to the health of the public.
Most would agree that the science of research should be sound and as aseptic as possible- completely free of deliberate and reckless interference.
However, it appears, money and increased profits can be a catalyst for disregard for human health with the clinical trial process that is largely unregulated.
This is particularly a factor on post-marketing studies of various pharmaceutical companies, as some pharmaceutical corporations seem to be deliberately conducting nothing less than seeding trials- with about a 50 percent tax credit for these trial sponsors.
Trials that are in fact pointless and void of scientific benefit.
Decades ago, clinical trials were conducted at academic settings that focused on the acquisition of knowledge and the completely objective discoveries of drugs and devices to benefit mankind.
Then, in 1980, the Bayh-Dole Act, Public Law 96-517,was created, which allowed for such places with their researchers to profit off of their discoveries that were performed for pharmaceutical companies and others in the past.
Furthermore, such academic institutions were coerced to license patented inventions to those pharmaceutical companies that will then commercialize these discoveries paid for in large part by the taxpayers who funded this research to a degree.
This resulted in the creation of for-profit research trial sites without any academic affiliation that are called Contract Research Organizations.
CROS utilize primarily community patient care clinics whose staff are absent of any research training compared with the former researchers that existed decades ago. They are regulated, so they say, by institutional review boards, or IRBs. Both are for profit and essentially cater to the sponsor of the clinical trial in which all are involved with manipulating.
Because of this structure, the clinical trial investigators of these pharmaceutical sponsored trials are likely novice compared with academic researchers.
This, of course, happens with intent by the sponsor who can and does control all aspects of the clinical trial protocol at the site locations of a clinical trial that the pharmaceutical company structures and even gives the trial the title they want for their marketing purposes.
These quite numerous CROS are in fact for- profit, with some CROs making billions of dollars a year, and this market continues to grow.
The trials conducted at such places again are sponsored by pharmaceutical companies that control and manipulate all aspects of the trial being conducted involving their particular drug chosen to be studied.
Etiology for their deception regarding this manipulation is because the pharmaceutical company that sponsors such a trial is basically creating a marketing tool for this drug of theirs to be studied in this manner.
This coercion is done by various methods of deception in subtle and tacit methods.
As a result, research in this protocol of the sponsor ensures favorable results of the sponsorâ(TM)s medication that is involved in the clinical trial they clearly own.
These activities are again believed to be absent of true or applied regulation to any degree, and therefore have the autonomy to create whatever they want to benefit the pharmaceutical sponsor.
There likely is a collusive relationship between the sites, the CRO, and the sponsor, as this whole system is planned beforehand by the pharmaceutical sponsor of their clinical t
Who needs a journal at all, when you have http://lulu.com/?
If the price point is right, community peer review can function just as well after publication. It is certainly preferable to having biased or imaginary reviewers.
Banks are in the business of selling trust. This doesn't stop them from raping the golden egg as often as they can get away with. Then there is an orgy of denial and offshore transactions while an outside party intervenes to "restore trust". Their words, not mine.
Elsevier is in the business of selling unimpeachability, aka, no scientist ever got fired for citing a reputable, peer reviewed journal.
Peer review has an especially strong appeal to the CYA crowd. The information in a peer reviewed journal is not necessarily all that great, but you confidently cite the journal without fear for your reputation.
The list of biases in peer reviewed journals would require a journal all to itself. They will tell you that method A (in which they have a financial stake) outperforms method B at half the cost, but they won't tell you that they accidentally discovered method C which will cure you almost for free.
Peer reviewed writing is sometimes so opaque you hardly dare to draw a specific conclusion. Yet you can't overtly find an error, which is mostly the point.
An all-pervading contempt for unthinking appeal to authority was among my first sentient experiences as a child. My hostility toward climbing up the food chain of rational authority to discover infinity squared as the basis step nearly melted my circuits. God the omnipotent, god the omnipresent, god the mysterious, god the unaccountable.
I gained my childhood sentience during the Von Daniken era and its peculiar aftermath.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_D%C3%A4niken
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_power
http://www.legendsofhockey.net/html/spot_oneononep198902.htm
Much has been made about the 'Pyramid Power' that Red Kelly used to help motivate his team. The Leafs were under terrific pressure to beat the Flyers. ... Kelly, whose sons had visited Egypt and spoke passionately about the supernatural powers of the pyramid, gave their father an idea. He placed pyramids under the Leaf bench and in the dressing room. "Red put a pyramid in the dressing room. I put my sticks underneath it hoping it might help." It seemed to help, but so did the assistance of something else - "I have a tie I wear when it's a crucial game," admitted Sittler. "I wore it one night when I got three goals. I had it on the time I had the ten points against Boston. I felt this game was so crucial, I went to the cleaners to pick up the tie specially."
Hey, you just don't know.
I was in a Sunday school class, a day in my life I'll never forget, and the Sunday school teacher taught the assorted passel of rug rats about the various magic properties of pyramids, such as the one employed by the hysterically desperate Leafs (check out the team's success rate in the subsequent four decades).
I wasn't sure if I should blame the church, some mind-numbing side effect of the adult condition (which seemed to also effect my elementary school teachers), the frowzy muffin and Kool-Aid Sunday school cult, small town inbreeding, the stultifying effects of the long dark Canadian winter, the near-to-toxic levels of new car smell in our Chevy Bel Air, the sulphur stockpile a kilometre down the tracks large enough to dike Holland, or the town's water supply. God, at least, was off the hook, having in my mind no influence on anything.
It wasn't long before the Kook-Aid theory made the leap.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown
Here is a recent video that cracks me up about the care and feeding of strange belief systems in children and young adults. I really have to get the rest of it.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/julia_sweeney_on_let
Yep, many, many years ago, I worked at Excerpta Medica (when they were on the Herrengracht) who were essentially a medical publisher, primarily of some specialist abstracting journals in medecine and closely related subjects. Occasionally they also produced specialist books such as Marler's Pharmaceutical and Chemical Synonyms, a quick lookup of trade and proper names for drugs and pharmaceutically active chemicals. They are part of Elsevier group who were reputed to be getting up to some very questionable activities, but Excerpta Medica was run at a loss.
In those days, Excerpta Medica had the Dutch great and good acting as editors and it was considered a valuable service by the Netherlands Academy of Sciences (which put Elsevier in a slightly more positive light with the authorities).
After I left, it was incorporated more into the main part of Elsevier and it may be then that it started to be seen as a profit centre in its own right. It certainly always had close links to the drug companies and occassionally printed some stuff for them - but never vanity publishing research journals.
See my journal, I write things there
Everyone who has conducted legitimate science, or expanded their medical knowledge, based on reading and/or referencing the fake journals, has been disserviced. The false information has been passed along and may continue since not all readers/users could ever be located. Science and medicine have been poisoned by this, and the damage can multiply. The publisher should print a final edition of each, containing only one article, saying that all previous work printed there is suspect at best. The problem could be somewhat mitigated if the editors of every other journal reviewed the articles they've printed to see if they contain references to those journals, and request the author(s) examine them for possible revision removing same. When the authors are no longer reachable the editors should do it.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Elsivier is a very large company; they have , over the last 20 years, bought a lot of speciality publishers (academic press) and they really dominate the field of technical/med/science publishin. It is possible the open source models will dethrone them, but this is happening much more slowly in the technical publishing field then in the newspaper field - as another poster noted, scientists need publications on their CVs, and elsivier provides that service.
Elsivier, as a large company, has the resource to weather a scandal; I have observed, that at least in the US, when a compny is caught, and acuatlly has to admit to having done something bad, what they do is advertise on npr or public radio (eg, archer daniels midland got caught, i forget for what, and spent money on the mcneill lehrer snooze hour; citigroup is spending money on npr)
people will forget how bad elsivier is
So there is no fraud.
Nonsense. Elsevier and the drug companies used the format of the publication to claim that the work was peer reviewed by expert, objective third parties. It wasn't. That's fraud.
People should go to jail for this. They have endangered peoples' lives. I'm sick of lowlifes claiming that a language lie is okay but somehow a non-language lie isn't.
They used the format of the publication specifically to fool doctors. If it made no difference then they wouldn't have done it. Repeatedly.
---
Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion. Anonymous commercial speech should be illegal.
who has published something in an Elsevier Journal (they publish a lot of conference series), i am personnaly disappointed. I wonder if it is possible to retract that article and republish it somewhere else.
Extreme problems may call for extreme solutions. The problem here is that it's not even *possible* to shut them down; they're more powerful than your government. The other lobby of comparable power is, of course, the military-industrial complex... That annual $650 billion isn't being retargeted any time soon.
you had me at #!
The linked Guardian story notes: "doctors skim, they take shortcuts, they rely on summaries, or worse." Um, doctors are familiar with the different levels of rigor in the peer review process at the important journals in their field. Here's a common shortcut: ignore journals that you've never heard of.
After some IEEE computer society conferences has found accepting software generated papers.
New Economic Perspectives
Regarding the nature of disease and the trend toward unhealth: Michel Foucault.
Regarding the reductionist worldview and its alternatives in science: Jentsch ("The Self Organizing Universe") and people like Luhmann studying dissipative systems, social systems, entropy dynamics, etc.
There are new, powerful paradigms that illuminate and unify natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, language, networks, etc. under central abstractions that have been afoot for two decades and that are powerful analytical tools, but it will take another half century before they leave the realm of "radical" and become the "norm.'
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Kevin Trudeau is a well-known fraud. I'm continually amazed that he manages to stay out of prison.
I don't know the "Big Pharma" hates KT, though he certainly wants you to believe that "they" do. After all, if "Big Pharma" was involved in some conspiracy to suppress his nonsense medicine it would lend his books some credibility.
Required reading for internet skeptics
As a young professor, I prepared for my first interview by reading the last three published articles of everyone who was going to interview me. I noticed that one guy seemed to get published very frequently in a journal that I had never heard of, articles that should never have passed peer review, so I looked into it. Not only was he on the editorial board, but everyone else who was on the editorial board also had published bad articles frequently. And a little more investigation revealed that all of hem were associate professors.
It was then that I realized that this was a vanity journal, probably dreamed up by these folks over a few beers at a conference. Each of them had written enough to publish about one article a year, which, when combined with an annual publication in a legitimate journal, would probably be enough to get each of them promotion and tenure at their respective research universities.
Have you ever known anyone with "Restless Leg?" It is real. It sucks. It existed (and I have known people with it) long before a drug company thought of a catchy name for it to market a drug to treat it. A close relative called it her "jumpy leg" problem. Twenty years ago. it caused many problems with getting a full night's sleep.
Why do many people pick on Restless Leg Syndrome as some kind of fake disease made up by drug companies to sell us shit? For folks that have it, it most certainly isn't fake or "designer."
SirWired
My opinion is that KT is a former bad apple that has turned around much like a blackhat getting busted and joining the good guys.
I also note that he doesn't attempt to hide his record.
The conspiracy is so deep and hidden that many people don't know about it.
As far as big pharma hating KT, I have received verification independent of his writings.
Please don't taint Pharmacology with the ignominy of Pharmaceutical dishonesty. THey are different domains!
Interesting. I occasionally have RLS symptoms, but over the years I've narrowed it down to a few clear causes:
I don't suppose items 2 or 3 might have any bearing on your own situation?
That said, YMWV (your mileage *will* vary), as everyone's system is different -- something modern Western medicine (or at least the medical mass media) is particularly bad at publicly recognizing.
Good luck,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I used to work for a subsidiary of Elsevier, working on some of their trade magazines and newsletters. Advertising and editorial are deeply intertwined.
For example, if an ad was botched (typo, image messed up) the response was we would provide editorial as a make good.
You can even work out editorial deals with some magazines based on the ad dollars spent.
I think this should cast doubt on medical research in general. I am a sociologist who has researched the stigma of obesity for years and I am convinced moderate "overweight" is one of the most over hyped risk there is. Most of the studies are epidemiological, and they do not account for social class (the poor are fatter so health risks of poverty fall under obesity), risky weight loss practices, or health care discrimination. Why are the studies so poorly done? It is hugely profitable. And almost all obesity research is funded by either diet or drug interests if you follow the money trail far enough. If my soc 101 students designed a study the way pharma does obesity studies they would be lucky to get a D.
I also have a friend who ghost writes for Pharma and it is clear that the "evidence" in evidence based medicine is manufactured. They know the results of the study before it ever comes out. Beyond disgraceful!!!