It is obvious to me that the administration doesn't want to deal with the problem and would rather deny it and pretend it is not happening. That's probably because the faculty who are part of the ghostwritting also bring huge amounts of grant money, private or federal. Unfortunately the pharmaceutical sector and academic medicine are too closely connected. Here is an excellent article (available online) published in American Psychologist (flagship journal of APA). Just read their findings that appear in bulleted points throughout the article, and pertain to issues such as inappropriate influence of pharmaceuticals on clinical practice, research, legislation, and medical education. Some highlights:
Source: Pachter, W. S., Fox, R. E., Zimbardo, P., & Antonuccio, D. O. (2007). Corporate funding and conflicts of interest: A primer for psychologists. American Psychologist, 62, 1005-1015.
http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/amp6291005.pdf"● The pharmaceutical industry influences most aspects of the American health care system that are relevant to its business interests: nonprofit patient groups (Ginsberg, 2006), physicians (Choudhry, Stelfox, & Detsky, 2002), professional and academic institutions, the U.S. Congress, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA; Antonuccio et al., 2003; Drinkard, 2005; Relman & Angell, 2002).
● Pharmaceutical industry money is so crucial to the funding of university medical centers that no threats or offers need to be made for a company to exert its influence (CSPI, 2003b; Elliott, 2001a).
● The pharmaceutical industry has the largest lobbying force of any industry (Drinkard, 2005; Relman & Angell, 2002). The pharmaceutical and health products industry spent $612 million on lobbying from 1998 to 2005, working on more than 1,400 congressional bills (Center for Public Integrity, 2006).
● In 2001, the pharmaceutical industry spent over $19 billion on marketing (Antonuccio et al., 2003). It has been estimated that $35 billion was spent that year on “marketing masquerading as education” and “marketing masquerading as research,” costs that were then passed on to the public via higher retail prices for the medicines they purchased (Angell, 2004).
● Overwhelming data show that researchers funded by pharmaceutical companies that sell the drug they are evaluating tend to produce results favorable to that drug (Bekelman, Le, & Gross, 2003; Bhandari et al., 2004; Bodenheimer, 2000; Coyle, 2002b; Lexchin, Bero, Djulbegovic, & Clark, 2003). For example, 96% of researchers writing favorably about a drug for hypertension were funded by the manufacturer that produced and sold that drug, but only 37% of those not funded by the company reported favorable results (Gorner, 2000).
● In search of easier profit, the thrust of industry supported research has shifted from trying to find causes and mechanisms of disease to certifying “me-too” drugs (copycats of negligible improvement or added value; Angell, 2004; Gorner, 2000).
● Almost half of medical school faculty members who serve on institutional review boards also serve as consultants to industry (Campbell et al., 2003). Moreover, institutional review board members do not always disclose their financial relationships with industry, even when they are making decisions about research protocols sponsored by the company with which they have a relationship or by a competing company (Campbell et al., 2006).
● The pharmaceutical industry is biasing the evidence base by increasing their control of investigators, research designs, and when or whether results are published (Bodenheimer, 2000; Bodenheimer & Collins, 2001; Lexchin et al., 2003; Melander, Ahlqvist-Rastad, Meijer, & Beermann, 2003; Vedantam, 2001).
● Evidence of the potentially extensive role of ghost writing (i.e., industry-authored publications in which the identified authors may have never actually seen the raw data) in the scientific literature (e.g., Healy, 2006; Healy & Cattell, 2003; Mowatt et al., 2002) highlights the problem of poor access to raw scientific data. Despite a 1999 law ostensibly requiring public disclosure of raw data from NIH funded studies, all requests for data access to date have been denied (Lenzer, 2006).
● Some corporations have pilloried and intimidated academicians whose research was viewed as contrary to the interests of the corporation (Needleman,1992). Several pharmaceutical firms have threatened researchers (Bodenheimer & Collins, 2001; Morin & Deane, 2003), interrupted trials, and blocked publication of unfavorable results (Bok, 2003; Greenberg, 2003)."
Again, these are just some highlights. Read all the bulleted points in the article to get a picture of the extent of the problem.
