Medical Journal

Medical journals serve as Big Pharma drug-marketing platform.

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The value of medical journals in providing physicians, researchers and other medical professionals an honest glimpse of the latest relevant, peer-reviewed medical science has greatly diminished in recent years. An extensive review published in the journal PLOS Medicine shows that medical journals today serve as little more than marketing platforms for pharmaceutical companies to push their drugs with little in the way of unbiased science.

Richard Smith, who served as an editor of the prestigious British Medical Journal (BMJ) for 25 years before resigning in 2004, warns that a bulk of the studies published in medical journals are pioneered by drug companies. More often than not, these studies push the agenda of the companies that launched them, procuring positive results that were cunningly derived through industry sleight of hand.

We’re not talking about pharmaceutical advertising here, which is also highly endemic in terms of conflicts of interest. We’re talking about studies — mainly randomized clinical trials — launched by drug companies that arrive at predetermined outcomes and are widely perpetuated in the medical literature to create the illusion that drugs and vaccines are safe and effective.

“Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry,” wrote Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet journal, back in March 2004, just one year before Smith published the review in question.

It’s not so much drug advertising as it is sponsored trials that corrupt medical journals

Although pharmaceutical advertising renders the quality of what’s been published in a given medical journal questionable, at least readers of that journal can see these advertisements and determine how seriously to take the contained studies. However, when the studies themselves are industry-sponsored and this is not disclosed, things get messy.

“A large trial published in a major journal has the journal’s stamp of approval (unlike the advertising), will be distributed around the world, and may well receive global media coverage, particularly if promoted simultaneously by press releases from both the journal and the expensive public-relations firm hired by the pharmaceutical company that sponsored the trial,” writes Smith.

“For a drug company, a favourable trial is worth thousands of pages of advertising, which is why a company will sometimes spend upwards of a million dollars on reprints of the trial for worldwide distribution. The doctors receiving the reprints may not read them, but they will be impressed by the name of the journal from which they come. The quality of the journal will bless the quality of the drug.”

Up to 75% of clinical trials published in major journals like JAMA, Lancet, NEJM, and Annals of Internal Medicine are industry-sponsored

Then there’s the issue of what’s actually being published in many of the world’s most well-respected medical journals. Upon investigation, Smith found that upwards of 75 percent of what is being published today in journals like Annals of Internal Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) are trials that have been directly funded by industry.

Smith’s systematic review uncovered that drug companies have become very adept at reaching the conclusions they desire by manipulating randomized trials. This is not necessarily accomplished through direct fraud (although that happens as well), but instead it occurs by engaging in what Smith says is “asking the ‘right’ questions.”

“The companies seem to get the results they want not by fiddling the results, which would be far too crude and possibly detectable by peer review, but rather by asking the ‘right’ questions,” Smith writes.

These include:

• Conducting a trial of a given drug against a treatment known to be inferior
• Conducting a trial against too low of a dose of a competitor drug
• Conducting a trial against too high of a dose of a competitor drug, making the drug in question seem less toxic
• Conducting a trial that is too small to show differences from competitor drugs
• Using multiple endpoints in a trial and selecting for publication only those that provide favorable results
• Conducting multi-center trials and selecting for publication only those that reach favorable results
• Conducting subgroup analyses and selecting for publication only those that are favorable
• Presenting results that are most likely to impress, such as showing a reduction in relative as opposed to absolute risk

Editor In Chief Of World’s Best Known Medical Journal: Half Of All The Literature Is False .

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Editor-In-Chief-Of-Worlds-Best-Known-Medical-Journal-Half-Of-All-The-Literature-Is-False

In the past few years more professionals have come forward to share a truth that, for many people, proves difficult to swallow.

One such authority is Dr. Richard Horton, the current editor-in-chief of the Lancet – considered to be one of the most well respected peer-reviewed medical journals in the world.

Dr. Horton recently published a statement declaring that a lot of published research is in fact unreliable at best, if not completely false.

“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.” 

This is quite distrubing, given the fact that all of these studies (which are industry sponsored) are used to develop drugs/vaccines to supposedly help people, train medical staff, educate medical students and more.

It’s common for many to dismiss a lot of great work by experts and researchers at various institutions around the globe which isn’t “peer-reviewed” and doesn’t appear in a “credible” medical journal, but as we can see, “peer-reviewed” doesn’t really mean much anymore. “Credible” medical journals continue to lose their tenability in the eyes of experts and employees of the journals themselves, like Dr. Horton.

He also went on to call himself out in a sense, stating that journal editors aid and abet the worst behaviours, that the amount of bad research is alarming, that data is sculpted to fit a preferred theory. He goes on to observe that important confirmations are often rejected and little is done to correct bad practices. What’s worse, much of what goes on could even be considered borderline misconduct.

Dr. Marcia Angell, a physician and longtime Editor in Chief of the New England Medical Journal (NEMJ), which is considered to another one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals in the world, makes her view of the subject quite plain:

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine” 

I apologize if you have seen it before in my articles, but it is quite the statement, and it comes from someone who also held a position similiar to Dr. Horton.

There is much more than anecdotal evidence to support these claims, however, including documents obtained by Lucija Tomljenovic, PhD, from the Neural Dynamics Research Group in the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences at the University of British Columbia, which reveal that vaccine manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and health authorities have known about multiple dangers associated with vaccines but chose to withhold them from the public. This is scientific fraud, and their complicity suggests that this practice continues to this day. (source)

This is just one of many examples, and alludes to one point Dr. Horton is referring to, the ommision of data. For the sake of time, I encourage you to do your own research on this subject. I just wanted to provide some food for thought about something that is not often considered when it comes to medical research, and the resulting products and theories which are then sold to us based on that research.

It’s truly a remarkable time to be alive. Over the course of human history, our planet has experienced multiple paradigm shifting realizations, all of which were met with harsh resistence at the time of their revelation. One great example is when we realized the Earth was not flat.

Today, we are seeing these kinds of revelatory shifts in thinking happen in multiple spheres, all at one time. It can seem overwhelming for those who are paying attention, especially given the fact that a lot of these ideas go against current belief systems. There will always be resistance to new information which does not fit into the current framework, regardless of how reasonable (or factual) that information might be.