by Jocelyn Kaiser
A new group is adding its voice to the furor over the influence of drug money on medical research and practice, saying there should be more money to study the problem. In a letter today to National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, 100 physicians, medical ethicists, and others call for funding:
The recent disclosure of ghostwritten articles, physician payoffs, and the use of academic opinion leaders to increase markets for FDA-regulated products indicate that ethical lapses may permeate biomedical research. ...
In your role as the director of “the steward of medical and behavioral research for the Nation,” we ask that you acknowledge the research gap on the effect of conflicts of interest and commercial influence on medical decisionmaking ...
Between bench and bedside lies a path treacherous with ethical quandaries. NIH is the best place to launch and support a scientifically rigorous inquiry into the state of research ethics, industry-academic relationships, and the effect of these relationships on human health. There is currently no identifiable mechanism through which NIH would fund this research.
The message—we want more money for our research—seems self-serving, and it's not as though NIH doesn't fund anything in this area already. (For example, NIH grants have supported surveys of academics about their industry funding.) But Georgetown University physician Adriane Fugh-Berman, who heads a group called Pharmed Out that spearheaded the letter, says NIH tends to reject grant applications on topics such as ghostwriting and industry funding for medical education. "I think that NIH has thought that it doesn't comes under their domain, and the trouble is that it doesn't come under anybody's domain," she says.
The letter's signatories show that diverse voices have come together to speak out on the issue. The list includes psychiatrists, current and former journal editors, ethicists (including Lisa Bero of the University of California, San Francisco, who studies the influence of drug money on research), patient and consumer advocates, medical students, and Susan Wood, an FDA official who quit over meddling in science by the Bush Administration. Pharmed Out is funded from a 2004 legal settlement involving Pfizer's marketing of a drug.
The letter ask for a face-to-face meeting with Collins. Stay tuned.
Congratulations to the PharmedOut group for addressing this conflict-of-interest stain on the reputation of medical science. A similar problem is the lack of honesty in non-pharma clinical research where medical doctors have committed blatant frauds against science to defend a long outdated and debunked doctrine about the routine blinding of premature babies. Admitting the iatrogenic origin of this long continued baby-blinding epidemic would be embarrassing to the profession and open the doors to costly liability suits. For a detailed documentation of these research frauds and their cover-up, see retinopathyofprematurity.org/01summary.htm.
If these patient-harming frauds committed in the name of science remain unacknowledged much longer, they are likely to further diminish the public trust in all pronouncements by scientists, even the honest ones.
Respectfully submitted,
Peter Aleff