“Medical journals are an extension of the marketing arm of pharmaceutical companies,” argues Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ and now Chief Executive of UnitedHealth Europe, in a provocative essay published in the open access international health journal PLoS Medicine.
The most conspicuous example of medical journals’ dependence on the pharmaceutical industry is the substantial income from drug advertisements, but Smith believes that this is “the least corrupting form of dependence,” since the ads are “there for all to see and criticize.”
The much bigger problem, he argues, lies with journals publishing clinical trials funded by industry. “For a drug company a favourable trial is worth thousands of pages of advertising, which is why a company will sometimes spend upwards of a million dollars on reprints of the trial for worldwide distribution.” Unlike ads, readers see these trials as the highest form of evidence, says Smith.
“Fortunately from the point of view of the companies who fund these trials—but unfortunately for the credibility of the journals who publish them—these trials rarely produce results that are unfavourable to the companies’ products.” Smith cites evidence from a total of 86 studies that the results of a trial are influenced by who funds it.
“The evidence is strong that companies are getting the results they want, and this is especially worrying because between two thirds and three quarters of the trials published in the major journals are funded by the industry.”