Online Health Information Can Be More Trustworthy Than Printed Texts
Recently Ed Silverman of Pharmalot considers the case of a ghost-written medical text’s mysterious disappearance. The 1999 book, “Recognition and Treatment of Psychiatric Disorders: A Psychopharmacology Handbook for Primary Care,” (reviewed in a psychiatry journal here) came under scrutiny last fall when it became evident that the physician “authors” didn’t just receive money from a relevant drug maker, SmithKline Beecham; they received an outline and text for the book from pharmaceutical company-hired writers.
poster for the X-Files
Now the book’s listing is gone from the website of STI (Scientific Therapeutic Information), the company that provided the authorship “help.” I tried to get a copy of the handbook on Amazon.com, where it’s currently out-of-stock. The book is listed in the Library of Congress on-line catalog: #99015420.
I’m reminded of clinical handbooks I used all the time when I was practicing hematology and oncology. At the hospital, I’d get freebie, small-sized chemo regimen primers that conveniently fit into my white coat pocket. In retrospect, perhaps I didn’t adequately check the authors’ credentials on those mini-book sources. It was too easy to take that information and keep it at hand, literally, especially in the times before we had constant Web access.
Now I’m struck by how the Internet – that infinite bucket of once-lowly or at-best mixed-quality information doctors disparaged for years – may prove a better information source than printed books.
It’s a minor paradox, or a twist in trust -
Now, with a few clicks if you know where to look, you can get recommendations for chemo dosing from reliable sources, like the NIH or peer-reviewed journal articles. Although transparency about physicians’ ties to industry is not nearly yet where it should be, you can find out about more about an author’s connections and potential conflicts of interest than at any time in medical publishing history.
What we write here can’t be discarded, burned, or go out of print.
(And it may be corrected, readily, before the next edition.)
*This blog post was originally published at Medical Lessons*
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