Feeling Safer Yet?
May 5th, 2008 at 6:41 am by Susie
And yet, people wonder why I don’t trust pharmaceutical companies:
Misleading research is often published in major medical journals and doctors are lending their names to it, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association said on Tuesday.
Doctors, regulators, publishers and others are all taking money, information and small presents from pharmaceutical companies and being influenced in the process, said Dr. Catherine DeAngelis.
“It goes for all of us,” DeAngelis, whose journal is influential nationally and globally, said in a telephone interview.
Her journal, commonly known as JAMA, published a paper accusing Merck and Co. of suppressing data that showed its now-withdrawn pain drug Vioxx was harming patients, and saying that academic researchers had lent credibility to the company’s allegedly manipulated research by putting their names on the work.
Merck and the independent researchers have denied this and say the journal is mistaken in this case.
But DeAngelis said there is a “gigantic” problem of drug companies influencing doctors and patients. Her journal presents the Merck case as a specific example of one facet of the problem.
