MEDICAL journals have become little more than marketing tools for the pharmaceutical industry, says Richard Smith, former editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal. And he has a drastic solution: journals should stop publishing the results of clinical trials and criticise them instead.
Most trials are paid for by companies, and Smith says they have become adept at ensuring that the results are favourable. The tricks range from simply asking the 鈥渞ight鈥� questions to making sure the doses of any rival drug are too low or too high, or doing multi-centre trials but only reporting from centres with the best results. Often positive results are published several times. 鈥淚 must confess that it took me almost a quarter of a century editing for the BMJ to wake up to what was happening,鈥� Smith writes in PLoS Medicine (vol 2, p 365).
Peer review usually fails to expose these tricks, he says. And there can also be a financial incentive for journals to publish privately funded studies: the companies involved often order thousands of reprints, which is highly lucrative for the journals. Smith argues that more trials need to be publicly funded, while the results of those that are paid for by companies should be published only on regulated websites, not in journals.
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None of the other medical journal editors contacted by New 杏吧原创 would comment.
