BioCentury
ARTICLE | Politics, Policy & Law

Sacred vs. profane

August 25, 2008 7:00 AM UTC

Medical journal editorials routinely attack the pharmaceutical industry, alleging drug companies corrupt the practice of medicine through inappropriate and overly aggressive marketing, while also criticizing doctors for allowing themselves to be influenced. The journal publishers themselves, however, play a key role in encouraging the behaviors their editors criticize via advertising, sponsored subscriptions and the promotion of reprints of company-sponsored clinical trials.

The latest example of this double standard came in the Aug. 19 Annals of Internal Medicine, which featured a paper based on documents uncovered in litigation against Merck & Co. Inc. According to the authors, the findings demonstrate that a study comparing Vioxx rofecoxib to naproxen, published in the Annals in 2003, was “an example of marketing framed as science.”...