It's an open secret in medicine that many of the articles that appear in medical journals, often purporting to be written by well-known academics, are actually written by unacknowledged ghostwriters in the pay of drug companies.
These "seemingly objective articles" are usually actually part of a marketing campaign to promote a product or draw attention to the condition it treats.
The Role of Medical Journals
However, questions about the role of medical journals have increased in the wake of the New England Journal of Medicine's admission that a 2000 article it published about Vioxx painkiller omitted information about heart attacks among those taking the drug. One element that is being looked at sharply is the "ghostwriting" practice and the medical journals' rules of author disclosure.
Biased Information
Increasingly, the practice of medical ghostwriting is being criticized on the grounds that it could hurt patients by giving doctors biased information. Drug companies claim that they're providing a service to academic researchers, who may not be skilled writers, and do not intend that the articles be biased.
An Unknown Number of Articles
An analysis found that 10 percent of articles on studies sponsored by the drug industry disclosed help from a medical writer. However, often the practice is not disclosed. An informal poll found that 80 percent of freelance medical writers had written articles that did not mention their contributions.
