Conflicts of financial interest — skated (again) past several medical journals

© 2018 Peter Free

 

20 December 2018

 

 

Theme

 

An economic system that treats greed as holy — rather than sinful — is probably going to kill people.

 

 

Consider the role of avarice — in medical research

 

Greed distorts science into anti-science. In medicine, this can kill (or not help) you.

 

Just doing science is difficult. See, for example, the statistical problems in generating decent proof, here.

 

When greed (for profit or position) enters full-bore, the problem of proof becomes insurmountable.

 

In that regard, see:

 

 

this — regarding conflicts of interest among members of the panels that generate medical practice guidelines

 

and

 

this — about a multi-institutional ripple of greed that killed at least 13 people.

 

 

Those two examples do not scratch the surface.

 

Our supposedly scientifically based medical system is surprisingly corrupt. We miss the integrity shortfall because we so seldom look.

 

 

Enter a representative example — of a miserable rat — Dr. José Baselga

 

It took Pro Publica and The New York Times to catch this paragon (of something):

 

 

Dr. José Baselga . . . resigned under pressure on Wednesday as one of the editors in chief of Cancer Discovery . . . after he failed to accurately disclose his conflicts of interest in dozens of articles in medical journals.

 

ProPublica and The Times found that Baselga had failed to report any industry ties in 60 percent of the nearly 180 papers he had published since 2013.

 

That figure increased each year — he did not disclose any relationships in 87 percent of the journal articles that he co-wrote last year.

 

© 2018 Katie Thomas, New York Times and Charles Ornstein, Top Cancer Doctor Resigns as Editor of Medical Journal, Pro Publica (19 December 2018)

 

 

Notice that

 

Balsega was not exposed, until The New York Times and Pro Publica began unraveling the strands of his greed.

 

Medical journals were not barriers to his lack of scientific integrity.

 

You can imagine what this institutional failure says about the reliability (and replicability) of the tens of thousands of published medical "research" articles each year.

 

 

The moral? — If you think that medical research is done with integrity, you are mistaken — in more instances than you might suspect

 

This is the capitalistic United States, after all. Why let professional ethics, or other people's lives, interfere with our profit-making?

 

As I hinted, a couple days ago, the problem lies with the complete collapse of ethical and professional standards in the United States.

 

It is not too far a stretch to say this "fall" is a spiritual one. Greed is, we've been told for centuries, a deadly sin. Yet, our economic system is enthusiastically based upon unregulated avarice. The choice qualifies, I suggest, as societally approved on-purpose-sinning.

 

If we took our purported religions seriously, we might do less of it.

 

Fat chance.

 

Add hell-to-heaven hypocrisy as another culturally shared trait.