Medical Papers By Ghostwriters Pushed Hormone Therapy

krou writes "The New York Times reports on newly released court documents that show how pharmaceutical company Wyeth paid a medical communications firm to use ghost writers in drafting and publishing 26 papers between 1998 and 2005 backing the usage of hormone replacement therapy in women. The articles appeared in 18 journals, such as The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and The International Journal of Cardiology. The papers 'emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the risks of taking hormones to protect against maladies like aging skin, heart disease and dementia,' and the apparent 'medical consensus benefited Wyeth ... as sales of its hormone drugs, called Premarin and Prempro, soared to nearly $2 billion in 2001.' The apparent consensus crumbled after a federal study in 2002 'found that menopausal women who took certain hormones had an increased risk of invasive breast cancer, heart disease and stroke.'"

Comments

What... would be the point?

[Lead Butthead]

Good! This is one of those cases where the pharmaceutical companies should be held accountable over and above the slap on the wrist the FDA will give them - if that.

Except that nobody is really being held accountable, unless you're talking about SERIOUS jail time for the officers and forfeiture of profit + interest (at credit card rate no less.) Let's be honest here, the worse that can be expected is that FDA will slap some fine on the companies, and the companies will just happily pass the cost onto its paying customers (you and I.) There is NO ACCOUNTABILITY.

Re:Wyeth isn't alone

[ColdWetDog]

I read that they, as a whole, stopped giving free notepads and clocks and pens and ice cream and subs to doctors at hospitals in person cuz it was costing too much. Geeeee, I wonder what they re-routed the money towards! I doubt they just completely cut out that form of marketing and didn't replace it. Contracted astroturfing apparently had better results so they dumped the pens and hired more writers. That's my theory at least.

No, the reason they dropped the pens / pencils / paper AND the cruises to the Bahamas AND the free golf AND the fancy dinners wasn't cost. The costs were cheap compared to the benefits they wrought. They stopped them because of the noise and bad press (and the belated 'ethics' whitepaper by the AMA and other trade groups).

The ghost writing and the funding of spurious research is / was one step removed from this in the public's eye. Now the heat is one here and big Pharma will paper over this issue and continue some other way of pushing their agenda. Look to lobbying for the next big push. If you take away an individual doctor's role in deciding which drug or treatment to prescribe and bump it up to a committee or better yet, a legislator, then you can pay a K Street firm a couple of times per year and not worry about having an army of drug reps running around.

Big Pharma has it's strategy mapped out for any possible occasion. They're smart, cunning and have been playing this game for a long time. Resistance is futile....

Re:Here come the Lawyers

[Trepidity]

That's true, but journals' reputations still do depend on a perception that the studies they publish are generally high-quality and honest. So I could see a case for these journals suing Wyeth for the damage to their reputations that these papers have caused.

Re:Here come the Lawyers

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

They willfully defrauded people into buying their products by lying to them about the risks.

Defrauded. Falsified. Lied. But what does that even mean anymore?

The reality is our society is so mired in exaggeration, misrepresentations, doublespeak, non-denial denials, irrelevant conclusions, marketing lies, cover your ass language and general bullshit that we, as a culture, have probably lost the ability or even the inclination to discriminate truth and lies.

And by discriminate, I don't mean being able to tell one from the other. I mean we have actually lost much of our capacity to actually care whether anyone is telling the truth or lying to us. Truthfulness is no longer rewarded. Indeed it is often punished. Falsehood is conversely rarely, if at all punished and is most often rewarded. This is the culture we live in, so why should people recognize any intrinsic ethic in telling the truth or unethical in lying? Even organizations that are supposed to deal in disclosing the truth are widely recognized and accepted to be mostly peddling lies.

Did Wyeth actually lie? Do you think you would be able to "prove" in a court of law that a single thing they paid to have printed was in fact a lie, rather than a simple massaging of data or a case of being liberal with the truth. The latter won't be enough to secure a conviction as well the Wyeth layers know. And besides, who care if people lie anyway.

Companies don't have honor or morals or ethics. If they break their word, even on a signed contract, no one is going to come after them. There's not going to be a permanent black mark on their reputations. With the world the size it is, the same holds true for people as well. Sure, some of us might get indignant about it all, but most people will never even hear about it, and most of those that do will forget about it by the next morning.

This is the society we, as democracies, have chosen for ourselves. The fruits of our decision should come as no surprise to anyone.