As a practicing physician I do not know how to correctly prescribe medications.  The reason for this is that the pharmaceutical companies have fashioned so much dishonest information about their products that common knowledge about them is utterly unreliable.  As you will learn from reading the following article, even the most respected medical journals and the research they print are tainted beyond belief.  After finishing this article you will further understand why my primary goal in your care is to get you out of the medical, surgical, and pharmaceutical businesses – and this can be done most effectively and safely by helping you regain your lost health.  Sick people take drugs and visit doctors – healthy people don't.  Thankfully, there are increasing numbers of health professionals, like Richard Smith, coming to the aid of the near helpless consumer by telling the truth.

John McDougall, MD

Medical Journals Are an Extension of the Marketing Arm of Pharmaceutical Companies

Richard Smith

Richard Smith is Chief Executive of UnitedHealth Europe, London, United Kingdom. E-mail: richardswsmith@yahoo.co.uk

Competing Interests: RS was an editor for the BMJ for 25 years. For the last 13 of those years, he was the editor and chief executive of the BMJ Publishing Group, responsible for the profits of not only the BMJ but of the whole group, which published some 25 other journals. He stepped down in July 2004. He is now a member of the board of the Public Library of Science, a position for which he is not paid.

Published: May 17, 2005

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0020138

Copyright: © 2005 Richard Smith. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Citation: Smith R (2005) Medical Journals Are an Extension of the Marketing Arm of Pharmaceutical Companies. PLoS Med 2(5): e138 

"Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry", wrote Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, in March 2004 [1]. In the same year, Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, lambasted the industry for becoming "primarily a marketing machine" and co-opting "every institution that might stand in its way" [2]. Medical journals were conspicuously absent from her list of co-opted institutions, but she and Horton are not the only editors who have become increasingly queasy about the power and influence of the industry. Jerry Kassirer, another former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, argues that the industry has deflected the moral compasses of many physicians [3], and the editors of PLoS Medicine have declared that they will not become "part of the cycle of dependency…between journals and the pharmaceutical industry" [4]. Something is clearly up.

The Problem: Less to Do with Advertising, More to Do with Sponsored Trials

The most conspicuous example of medical journals' dependence on the pharmaceutical industry is the substantial income from advertising, but this is, I suggest, the least corrupting form of dependence. The advertisements may often be misleading [5,6] and the profits worth millions, but the advertisements are there for all to see and criticise. Doctors may not be as uninfluenced by the advertisements as they would like to believe, but in every sphere, the public is used to discounting the claims of advertisers.

The much bigger problem lies with the original studies, particularly the clinical trials, published by journals. Far from discounting these, readers see randomised controlled trials as one of the highest forms of evidence. A large trial published in a major journal has the journal's stamp of approval (unlike the advertising), will be distributed around the world, and may well receive global media coverage, particularly if promoted simultaneously by press releases from both the journal and the expensive public-relations firm hired by the pharmaceutical company that sponsored the trial. 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. The doctors receiving the reprints may not read them, but they will be impressed by the name of the journal from which they come. The quality of the journal will bless the quality of the drug.