Our Daily Meds : Drug studies in medical journals are often written by advertising agencies

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Sunday, January 11, 2009 12:09 pm Email this article
"[ The drug companies ] have a technique which they benignly call 'Publications Planning'," Melody Petersen, author of a new book called Our Daily Meds: How The Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves Into Slick Marketing Machines And Hooked The Nation On Prescription Drugs told Bill Moyers.

"What this is, is that they want to get as many articles published in our medical journals as they can, that showed their [ drugs ] in a favorable light, and we'll get physicians to prescribe them.

"So they often hire on Madison Avenue advertising agency to write up an article for them, or a study, and the name of the advertising agency rarely appears in the published version.

"Instead, they hire doctors to put their name on as author [ of the paper ]." Former New York Times Journalist

Melody former covered the drug industry for the New York Times

Melody, who formerly covered the drug industry for the New York Times, revealed this last Friday night, May 16th, 2008, in an interview with Bill Moyers on his PBS television program Journal.

REFERENCE

Petersen M. Our Daily Meds : How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves Into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

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