- The pharmaceutical industry routinely bribes doctors
and "ghostwrites" articles about drugs in major medical journals,
MPs were told yesterday.
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- Professor David Healy, of the University of Wales, told
the Commons health select committee that as many as half the articles published
in journals such as the British Medical Journal and The Lancet were written
by members of the industry who had a vested interest in selling the drugs
involved.
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- Respected clinicians were then paid to have their names
put at the top of the articles, he claimed, even though they had not seen
the raw data on which they were based.
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- He said "ghostwritten" articles had far more
of an effect on which drugs doctors prescribe than Caribbean conferences
where doctors were given massages and "loaded down" with bags
of gifts.
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- "The problem isn't the adverts, the problem isn't
the trips to the Caribbean," he said. "We are influenced by articles
in journals."
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- He said he had been asked to put his name to an article,
but had not done so. He then saw the same article bearing the name of Siegfried
Kasper, from the Department of General Psychiatry at the University of
Vienna.
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- The committee, which is holding an inquiry into the influence
of the pharmaceutical industry, was told by another doctor that he had
been offered two years' salary to suppress data about a drug.
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- Dr Peter Wilmshurst, a consultant cardiologist at the
Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, said: "I know the pharmaceutical industry
influences the research that is published. I suspect this is as common
now as ever. I think it is very common. People are influenced by opinion
leaders who are paid consultants to the company."
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- The pharmaceutical industry is reeling from the recent
withdrawal of the rheumatoid arthritis drug, Vioxx, and widespread concerns
over the anti-depressant Seroxat being prescribed for children.
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- At yesterday's hearing, Graham Vidler, head of policy
for the Consumers' Association, said the industry's concern with profits
and shareholders was "in direct conflict with the responsibilities
of the NHS".
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- After the hearing, a spokesman for the Association of
the British Pharmaceutical Industry said there was some doubt that the
committee was approaching the issue constructively.
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- He said there was "nothing wrong" with articles
in major medical journals being written up for a clinician by a company
"as long as the person has seen the article and signed it off".
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- "It is quite wrong if people are putting their names
to something they haven't read."
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- A spokesman for the British Medical Journal said: "The
BMJ asks authors to state that they accept full responsibility for the
conduct of the study, had access to the data, and controlled the decision
to publish.
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- "We also publish contributorship statements for
each piece of research, which show exactly what each contributor has done."
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- A spokesman for The Lancet said Prof Healy's comments
were "a wild exaggeration".
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- Dr Des Spence, who runs the British arm of No Free Lunch
- a campaign against the industry's influence on doctor's prescriptions,
attacked the "widespread hospitality culture", which saw doctors
accepting lunches from pharmaceutical companies every single day.
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- "If civil servants, teachers or policemen were receiving
this level of hospitality there would be a public outcry," he said.
"However, there is some idea that doctors are anointed by God - this
simply isn't true."
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- He said doctors were just a cross-section of the population,
and easily influenced, but they don't complain "because it would be
like complaining that Father Christmas gave too many presents this year".
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