Playing Doctor: Profile Of A Medical Ghostwriter

Dr. Carl Elliott writes about ghostwriting in the December issue of The Atlantic magazine, “Playing Doctor: How to spin pharmaceutical research.” He profiles a young scientist (“David”) who became a ghostwriter about 10 years ago.

Excerpts:

“Ghostwritten articles surface again and again in litigation (in cases concerning Vioxx, Fen-Phen, Zyprexa, Premarin, Neurontin, and Zoloft, to mention just a few). Years before the Avandia scandal, GlaxoSmithKline paid $2.5 million to the State of New York to settle a lawsuit alleging that it had concealed studies suggesting an increased risk of suicidal behavior in children and teenagers taking Paxil, most notoriously in an article “authored” by Dr. Martin Keller of Brown University. One 2003 study in The British Journal of Psychiatry found that ghostwriters working for a single medical-communications agency had produced more than half of all medical-journal articles published on Zoloft over a three-year period.

To many critics, the moral outrage of ghostwriting is like that of plagiarism: academic physicians are getting credit for articles they didn’t actually write. To David, letting someone else take the credit for his work is a minor humiliation. The real problem, of course, is much worse: spinning data perverts science. It also downplays risks that can lead to serious injuries, and deaths. As David puts it, “The moral crime I was being asked to commit was to do with truthfulness.”

A few years ago, David went to a cardiology congress in Barcelona, where he had dinner one evening with a group of fellow medical writers. They were a friendly bunch, but he found them terribly sad. Medical writing has little glamour, and whatever moral purpose it might once have carried has been rubbed away by the constant friction with commerce. If you are a true believer in the glory of the market, the work might be invigorating, and the long hours a mark of pride. But if you are a lapsed biologist, raised in the church of science but compelled to leave, it is apparently a source of nagging resentment. Says David, who for all his protests has yet to give up his job, “What a wretched epitaph to a life this would be.”

*This blog post was originally published at Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog*


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