Canuckflack

Big pharma custom-orders medical journal articles?

// December 14th, 2005 //

Nice piece in the WSJ yesterday on the relationships between big pharma companies, researchers, medical writers and medical journals. Turns out scientists (and the big pharma companies that sponsor their research) sometimes turn to specialist medical writers to actually produce papers to be published in distinguished journals.

That isn’t much of a surprise to us communications professionals, who are called upon to ghostwrite materials everyday.

Luckily for us, the Pittsburg Post-Gazette ran most of the article today.

The WSJ rightly questions the relationship between pharma marketers, medical writers and academic researchers who seem too preoccupied to thoroughly vet a ghost-written article. To me, it’s not the process of preparing the document that seems suspicious: it’s the apparent willingness of participants to bow to big pharma’s marketing needs.

Some excerpts from the documents used to develop the reporting are avaliable at WSJ/OnlineToday.

BTW – the American Medical Writer Association seems to be torn about its own nomenclature :the AMWA Code of Ethics refers to biomedical communicators, not medical writers. I understand there may be a legitimate distinction between the terms, but I always thought a biomedical communicator is what Dr. Bones used when treating the crew of the old Star Trek.

Technorati: pharma medical writer ethics medical research