HRT is booming, despite a history of being rife with ghostwriting paid for by pharmaceutical companies.
Tobacconizing the scientific literature: Pharmaceutical companies promote their products via the use of vendors producing ghostwritten manuscripts which are placed into medical journals.
Tobacconizing the scientific literature
In just 2017, Slate published an excellent article about pharmaceutical industry funded ghostwriting. Think of this Ghostwriting as “Science” Laundering.
Excerpt from Slate’s article Big Pharma’s Attempt to Ghostwrite for Stat Ended Badly—but Not Badly Enough:
Industrial ghostwriters started appearing in the 1960s, when people were figuring out that cigarettes cause cancer, and later, in the 1980s and 1990s, when scientists began to probe the effects of secondhand smoke. In response, tobacco executives started to summon legions of ghostwriters, called by the ritual sacrifice of stacks of little green pieces of paper. In return, they tried to sway public opinion by putting soothing, tobacco-friendly words in the mouths of seemingly unaffiliated scientists.
Since then, ghostwriters employed by parts of the pharmaceutical industry have been busily tobacconizing the scientific literature. Gaze into the depths of PubMed for long enough, and they will materialize before your eyes, promoting Wyeth’s Prempro, Merck’s Vioxx, and Pfizer’s Neurontin, just to name a few. (It’s not only Big Pharma that’s been dabbling in the dark arts; recently, for example, ghosts were spotted defending Monsanto’s Roundup.)
HRT “Science” Laundering
This corruption is the case with HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy). In 2010, PLOS reported on medical ghostwriting in regards to Wyeth (purchased by Pfizer) and its promotion of HRT.
Here’s the summary of what was found:
Some 1500 documents revealed in litigation provide unprecedented insights into how pharmaceutical companies promote drugs, including the use of vendors to produce ghostwritten manuscripts and place them into medical journals.
Dozens of ghostwritten reviews and commentaries published in medical journals and supplements were used to promote unproven benefits and downplay harms of menopausal hormone therapy (HT), and to cast raloxifene and other competing therapies in a negative light.
Specifically, the pharmaceutical company Wyeth used ghostwritten articles to mitigate the perceived risks of breast cancer associated with HT, to defend the unsupported cardiovascular “benefits” of HT, and to promote off-label, unproven uses of HT such as the prevention of dementia, Parkinson's disease, vision problems, and wrinkles.
Given the growing evidence that ghostwriting has been used to promote HT and other highly promoted drugs, the medical profession must take steps to ensure that prescribers renounce participation in ghostwriting, and to ensure that unscrupulous relationships between industry and academia are avoided rather than courted.
Most of use should know by now, since the Gender Identity Industry (the most highly funded fake-civil-rights movement ever), sex-hormones have a new target market: Children and others who have been manipulated into thinking that she or he was born in the wrong body based on sex stereotypes (associations of color, clothing, behavior). The horrible side effects are the same, but it’s the price people pay when they’ve been sold that living an authentic life via life long medicalization is their only option.