A Bully Pulpit is a conspicuous position that provides an opportunity to speak out and be listened to. This term was coined by President Theodore Roosevelt, who referred to the White House as a "bully pulpit", by which he meant a terrific platform from which to advocate an agenda.
Flashback
In 1980, New England Journal of Medicine editor Arnold Relman saw something ominous coming up ahead, and wrote an editorial [The new medical-industrial complex] warning that there was a threat to the integrity of academic medicine from a growing medical industry. And by 1984, the NEJM instituted a policy against publishing any editorials or review articles by authors with industry Conflicts of Interest. But by 1999 things had changed dramatically, a story I summarized in a narrative…. At the time, the new editor, Jeffrey Drazen, was embroiled in a controversy over his own ties to industry [see New England Journal of Medicine Names Third Editor in a Year, FDA censures NEJM editor, Medical Journal Editor Vows to Cut Drug Firm Ties].
Flash Forward
In the summer of 2015, Drazen published an editorial suggesting that the NEJM rescind Relman’s policy and allow experts with COI to write reviews and editorials, introducing a three part series by one of his staff reporters explaining why this was really a good idea:
Revisiting the Commercial–Academic Interface
The suggestion was met with a swift flurry of negative responses from some of medicine’s solidest citizens:
And I couldn’t seem to keep my mouth shut about it either [a contrarian frame of mind… , wtf?…, wtf? for real…, a narrative…, not so proud…, unserious arguments seriously…, the real editors speak out…, got any thoughts?…, not backward…], mostly amplifying on what the others said. I’ll have to add that it felt almost personal. The New England Journal of Medicine was my own very first medical subscription ever, and I read it cover-to-cover for years. It was part of my coming of age as a physician, articles embedded in my own scientific and ethical infastructure. And I felt that Jeffrey Drazen was betraying that history. Who was he to do that? Over the year and a half since that series came out, he’s been on my radar. But the New England Journal of Medicine isn’t one of the journals I follow regularly, so it only came up when there was a loud blip, like his particularly obnoxious editorial, Data Sharing – the one where he warned us about "data parasites" [see notes from a reluctant parasite…].
Then, someone sent me a link to this month’s The Large Pharmaceutical Company Perspective about several heroic PHARMA adventures. I noticed it was from a series called The Changing Face of Clinical Trials, so I ran down the rest of the series and read them all. And then I found some other NEJM Clinical Trial Offerings offerings in 2016.
The Changing Face of Clinical Trials
The Final Rule
History of Clinical Trials
When I got down to the next ones about Data Sharing, I went back even further because I was waking up to something I had kind of forgotten – a bit of relevant sleight of hand that should have been on the front burner, but somehow got lost in the shuffle. What I realized was that the series I started this post with, Revisiting the Commercial–Academic Interface, didn’t just come out of the blue. It was part of a story that was larger – one that I’ll remind us of in the next post. But first here are the articles on Data Sharing:
Data Sharing
And so on to the reminder in the next post[s] – how Data Transparency got turned into Data Sharing – and why I called this the bully pulpit…
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