Four of the six academic medical professionals accused of signing their names to ghostwritten studies and texts have denied the claims, including School of Medicine professor Kimberly Yonkers. Yale School of Medicine administrators refused to comment on whether the School has investigated nonprofit watchdog Project on Government Oversight’s claim that the professor had a 2003 report on GlaxoSmithKline’s antidepressant, Paxil, and premenstrual dysphoric disorder ghostwritten for her. Yonkers claimed she edited the writing company’s draft substantially.
In response to POGO’s ghostwriting accusation against Brown University Medical School professor Martin Keller, Brown’s Provost David Kertzer told the Brown Daily Herald the administration generally “reviews relevant information and addresses any resulting concerns through its internal processes” upon receiving a complaint like POGO’s. But Kertzer still refused to comment specifically about Keller.
Alan F. Schatzberg, previous chairman of psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine who POGO accused of signing his name to a ghostwritten textbook, has hired an attorney to voice his argument. The attorney, Stuart Clark, asks that POGO apologize to Schatzberg and retract the ghostwriting accusations the letter published on its website.
In a letter Clark sent to POGO’s attorney Scott Amey on Dec. 9, Clark admitted that Schatzberg and the textbook’s listed coauthor Charles B. Nemeroff, chairman of psychiatry at the University of Miami medical school, received acknowledged “editorial support” from Diane Coniglio and Sally Laden, the same Scientific Therapeutics Information medical writer involved in Yonker’s 2003 study. But, Clark says neither writer, “nor anyone else” ghostwrote the book…
I have a former classmate who has been a "ghost-writer" for years – writing autobiographies and other kinds of books for famous people. He talks to them and puts what they have to say into some form with their collaboration that passes literary muster. I gather it’s a lucrative side bar to his own writing. He’s kind of secretive about that part of his life for obvious reasons. But what’s being described here is a different kind of "ghost-writing." The medical writers aren’t just there to make things more readable. These writers are hired by the Pharmaceutical Company who are themselves in the loop. There’s an amazing interview on the PharmedOut site of a degree program in medical writing, and the Program Director says that most contracts come from the Pharmaceutical Companies. In the instances cataloged in the POGO Letter to NIH on Ghostwriting Academics, the allegation is that the process is a conduit for the pharmaceutical industry to directly promote their products in the guise of academic scientific publications. It’s a very serious charge. It’s little wonder that those charged are mounting such a vigorous defense. But in the cases cited, they look pretty bad.
We ask that you implement new policies that will require institutions to ban ghostwriting, and to make NIH funding contingent upon periodic certification from institutions that ghostwriting is strictly prohibited and that enforcement mechanisms such as disciplinary action and dismissal are in place… Additionally we ask that you fund seminars and research on ghostwriting to educate physicians about this practice and ensure that it disappears from biomedical research altogether.
It seems to me, like so many controversies, the argument gets hung up on the definition of words; here it’s “ghost-written.”
What’s important in this is who originated and outlined the ideas and presented the data. It’s fine if a professional writer then whips it into coherent readability. But why not just use ordinary writing-fixers for that? What special talent would writers working for pharmaceutical companies have to offer — if not the interests of them that pay them?
It seems simple on the face of it. The whole purpose is to serve the profits of the pharmaceutical company. Case closed.
Exactly. Have you returned to the world of the living?