Alarm bells are ringing in the offices of the editors of the world’s leading medical journals. The editors of The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and the Canadian Medical Association Journal, to name just a few, have now gone public with their concerns, in a remarkable joint statement.
The gist of their warning: the values of the marketplace are corroding and corrupting the foundational values of medical science. Scientists are supposed to be impartial and objective, but as the journal Nature recognizes [editorial, 23rd August, 2001]: "There are circumstances in which selection of evidence, interpretation of results or emphasis of presentation might be inadvertently or even deliberately biased by a researcher’s other interests."
The editor of The Lancet, goes even further. In a remarkably candid public statement he declares that "nine out of ten papers" submitted to his journal, concerned with new drugs, are found by independent reviewers to be "deliberately skewed in favour of the new products being studied."
The major culprit? Evidence is accumulating [See, e.g., New England Journal of Medicine, 1998: 338: 101-6] that research which is funded by the pharmaceutical industry tends significantly to overstate the benefits and to understate the potential harm of new drugs. The major victim? Patients. Because patient health and safety is put at serious risk when clinical trials are not fairly designed or the resulting data are not accurately presented and analysed.
The Canadian public depends heavily on our university faculties of medicine and hospital research centres to tell us whether the new drugs they are testing are safe and effective. Deplorably, Canadian governments have been unwilling to fund adequately the necessary research effort.
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