More Unscience of Medicine

Found a couple more stories relating to how screwed up our medical system is -- specifically how it is profoundly unscientific due to pressures to be profitable.

As I have recently noted, modern medicine has serious shortcomings in the scientific method department. Another article in The Atlantic reminds us that many of the peer reviewed studies published aren't even written by the authors but are instead ghost written by third parties.

The mechanics of the ghostwriter’s job are fairly simple, David says. Early on, a medical-communications agency and its pharmaceutical-company sponsors will agree on a title for an article and a potential author, usually an academic physician with a reputation as a “thought leader.” The agency will ask the thought leader to “author” the article, sometimes in exchange for a fee. The ghostwriter will write the article, or perhaps an extended outline containing the message the company wants to transmit, and send it along to the physician, who may make some changes or simply sign it as written and submit it to a journal, usually scrubbed of any mention of the ghostwriter, the agency, or the pharmaceutical company. David says he rarely even sees the published articles he writes.

And Newseek covered Dr. Ioannidis, who I wrote about last week.