Check Out Antidote: The Best Blog on Ghostwriting

Occasionally I admire the work of William Heisel, a journalist and blogger who writes the razor-sharp health blog Antidote, hosted by the University of Southern California and the Annenberg School for Communication. Lately, Heisel has been digging into UCSF's Drug Industry Document Archive (DIDA), specifically its huge collection of smoking gun documents about the medical writing company DesignWrite. There are reams of material here and there is nobody better than Heisel at making sense of it all, and revealing the bankrupt sense of morality that seemed to have permeated DesignWrite and everything it touched.

Currently, Heisel is blogging about Dr. David Archer, an ob/gyn and a key part of the Wyeth/DesignWrite team. Wyeth pharmaceuticals hired DesignWrite to ghostwrite dozens of articles to promote its various products, including birth control pills, antibiotics, and the hormone replacement pill Premarin. Heisel traces Dr. Archer's activities with DesignWrite with devastating tenacity, following the path of financial relationships through the drug company, bought-out "journals," medical writers, and so-called "authors." Each time, the punch line ends up being a glowing endorsement of a Wyeth product, authored by Dr. Archer, but written by...who knows?

At one point, Archer was the editor of a newsletter called "Menopausal Medicine," which is funded by Wyeth. As editor, he had accepted an article by Dr. James V. Fiorica (also a Wyeth-kept man) entitled "Mammographic breast density and hormone replacement therapy." Ghostwritten by DesignWrite, it was a carefully crafted argument that HRT does not interfere with images on mammography (as has been charged by others academics). In a move reminiscent of the Nemeroff/VNS/Neuropsychopharmacology fiasco, Archer was playing on both sides of the field, each side chock-full of conflicts of interest.

Says Heisel: "[Archer] was supposed to be, as the journal editor, the ultimate arbiter of the strength of the submissions to Menopausal Medicine. But, as documents in the Drug Industry Document Archive show, he also was working directly with DesignWrite on tailoring the article."

Ghostwriting Stays in the Spotlight

With Natasha Singer's article on ghostwriting appearing in the Health section of today's New York Times, this underhanded method of drug promotion is in the public spotlight as never before. Medical ghostwriting leaches out the confidence we have in the authenticity of medical research, because the articles are conceived and written by drug company marketers and their surrogates. But when they are published in the top journals, they look like serious reports of medical science, complete with the names of prestigious doctors who are dubbed "authors."

After you read the New York Times article, I suggest you read this very clever article by William Heisel, a two time Pulitzer finalist, who blogs on Reporting on Health, a project of the Annenberg School for Communication at USC. Heisel's focus is on the self-deluded ways doctors are rationalizing their partipation in medical ghostwriting. For example, Dr. Leon Speroff, a former professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Oregon Health Sciences University who allowed DesignWrite to put his name on a paper he didn't write, defended his bad behavior by saying that it was then "standard practice" to not disclose a drug company's involvement.

Comments Heisel:

Why is it when these researchers are caught with a drug company's hand playing them like a puppet, they pull the "standard practice" line? Standard for whom? Certainly not for the patients taking the pills and presumably not for the journal editors accepting the articles for publication. Perhaps this is something Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, should ask in a hearing. Speroff told the Journal Sentinel he had nothing to apologize for:

"There is nothing dishonest about it."

Speroff was quoted in this excellent investigative report on medical ghostwriting at University of Wisconsin written by--who else?--the incomparable John Fauber and Meg Kissinger of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, both of whom should be on the short list at the next awards meeting of the Pulitzer committee.