1 Boring Old Man

This is a rambler, following up on this morning’s question about paper churning.

Dr. John Rush is the master at it [whatever the point]. Rush’s CV as of January 2011 lists 638 articles. On PubMed he has 533 as of today. Whatever the actual count, it’s pretty impressive. Back when I was looking at STAR*D, I noticed that most of Rush’s STAR*D articles said "The authors acknowledge the editorial support of Jon Kilner, M.S., M.A." [a study in pollen…]. Jon Kilner’s not that hard to locate [http://kilnerwriter.net/]. He’s a trained medical writer as his day job, but he also writes other science fiction [Songs of Ice and Darkness].

 

Dr. Rush is over at SCRI too. As best I can tell, it’s a Clinical Research Organization involved in multiple aspects of Clinical Research and, as it turns out, getting things published [moving to Singapore certainly only slowed down the steady output from Dr. Rush, with Jon Kilner’s editorial assistance]. Looking around on the SCRI site, I of course wanted to take a look at their Mission and Vision Statements [always a sure-fire way to understand a company – clear, direct, to the point]. It was a large graphic and on the bottom it concluded with their signature 5 ‘C’s:

I particularly honed in on Collaboration and Co-authorship, having marveled not only at the number of papers John Rush has authored, but the number of co-authors on most of them. Then I remembered something – a comment Nancy Wilson had made back in April. She had been at UT, and sent a link to a slide presentation by Dr. Rush from September 2006 that definitely fits this topic. Look it over. Dr. Rush is the go-to man for getting things published, and getting many papers out of a single study. It’s actually an amazing document and is right in line with SCRI’s 5 ‘C’s.

Validation of the Kidney Disease Quality of Life-Short Form:
a cross-sectional study of a dialysis-targeted health measure in Singapore
^{by Veena D Joshi, Nandakumar Mooppil, and Jeremy FY Lim}
BMC Nephrology 2010 11:36.

^{In Singapore, the prevalence of end-stage renal disease (ESRD) and the number of people on dialysis is increasing. The impact of ESRD on patient quality of life has been recognized as an important outcome measure. The Kidney Disease Quality Of Life-Short Form (KDQOL-SF™) has been validated and is widely used as a measure of quality of life in dialysis patients in many countries, but not in Singapore. We aimed to determine the reliability and validity of the KDQOL-SF™ for haemodialysis patients in Singapore.}

^…

^{Conclusions: The psychometric properties of the KDQOL-SF™ resulting from this first-time administration of the instrument support the validity and reliability of the KDQOL-SF™ as a measure of quality of life of haemodialysis patients in Singapore. It is, however, necessary to determine the test-retest reliability of the KDQOL-SF™ among the haemodialysis population of Singapore.}

^{Acknowledgements …The authors appreciate the support of the Singapore Clinical Research Institute for the editorial assistance provided by Jon Kilner, MS, MA (Pittsburgh, PA., USA).}

There’s something fundamental about this story that I’m pretty sure I’m not capable of understanding. He and I trained at approximately the same time, both did some time in the military, and both stayed on the faculty after training. This has been the strangest of times in the world of psychiatry, but it’s impossible for me to follow how that lead to him to where he is today – an expert on churning out scientific papers, living in Singapore. There’s a court trial next month against a Pharmaceutical Company [Johnson & Johnson] that alleges that the Texas Medical Algorithm Project that Dr. Rush directed was a scam – a way of directing doctors in public medical facilities [ultimately in sixteen States] to use drugs that were extremely expensive, but no better than the available generic drugs. The only reason for the program that I can see was to line the drug companies’ pockets with money. And the bulk of Dr. Rush’s copious article output recently is about some studies that cost the NIMH a mint, but yielded next to nothing [STAR*D and CO-MED].

Nancy Wilson