by Martha Rosenberg, via The Huffington Post,
Most people blame direct-to-consumer advertising, especially on TV, for elevating everyday anxiety to depression, depression to bipolar disorder, childhood behavior problems to psychiatric illnesses, lack of sleep to excessive sleepiness, migraines to epilepsy drug deficiencies and old age to hormone deficiency.
But ghostwriting also helps the national malaise of people suffering from and treating diseases that didn't even exist before and ballooning government and private health plans costs.
There are 200 U.S. medical education and communication companies (MECCs) who ghostwrite medical journal articles for pharma for $20,000 to $40,000 per article. Companies like Complete Healthcare Communications (CHC) whose phalanx of 50 medical writers, editors and medical directors promise a "84.5 percent acceptance rate for first-time manuscript submissions."
Ghostwriting was behind the blockbuster Vioxx, withdrawn in 2004 for doubling the risk of heart attacks.
"Merck designed the trial, paid for the trial, ran the trial," Dr. Jeffrey R. Lisse told the New York Times about a Vioxx study he authored in the Annals of Internal Medicine that left out three cardiac deaths. Oops. "Merck came to me after the study was completed and said, 'We want your help to work on the paper.' The initial paper was written at Merck, and then it was sent to me for editing."
Medical journals themselves can make $450,000 off one such ghostwritten article, because pharma orders reprints which reps disseminate as sales pieces ("look, Doc -- it says right here").
Click here to read the rest of this article at HuffingtonPost.com.
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