A Problem with Medical Journali$m: Feinman Responds
Dr. Maryanne Demasi wrote recently about the uneasy relationship between medical journals and pharmaceutical companies’ financial influence over editorial decisions:
“Medical journals are perceived as the most trusted providers of medical information for doctors, researchers and patients. The journals are generally regarded as an unbiased, reliable source of information about drug interventions…
And for many journals, revenue from pharmaceutical advertising and the purchasing of reprints constitutes a substantial proportion of their income. Concerns about whether drug industry funding is corrupting medical journals has been an ongoing issue.Prof Peter Gøtzsche, the paper’s third co-author, believes it was about censoring the research. “The medical publishing system is broken. There are far too many financial connections between big publishers and big pharma,” he said. “The system doesn’t ensure that solid research which goes against financial interests can get published without any major obstacles.”
What follows is Richard Feinmans response, in a colloquy with LCHF and Keto colleagues.:
Great article. I actually felt some embarrassment. I added this comment:
An excellent discussion. I think it underestimates the extent to which the journals have changed and have now become a big profit operation. I don't have any data but I suspect that the charges to authors by open access journals greatly exceed revenues from subscription to traditional journal. At a minimum there are the great savings on not having to buy ink or maintain many printing presses and the savings on postage, And, of course, reviewers are still not paid. The big bucks themselves should constitute a conflict of interest but given the high controversy in many areas of medicine and the tendency of editors to favor one side or the other, there is palpable bias.
For most journals, simply reducing standards will assure submissions but with meta-analysis and various kinds of reviews, nobody has to do an experiment to get published. For "prestige" journals like the collection of publications carrying big names like Lancet and JAMA, the large author fees allow the editors to select those that conform to the party line and reject minority opinion without loss of revenue. Lancet Public Health got $ 5.000 for Seidelmann, et al. which said, in essence that low-carbohydrate diets -- the long standing nemesis of establishment science -- would kill you. It turns out that no low-carbohydrate diets were studied. In fact, no diets were studied at all. Authors simply made up a "diet score" and analyzed a study that was not about the subject. One of the authors, Walter Willett, is on the board of EAT Lancet some kind of plant-based advocacy group. I believe the group is associated with a well-known medical journal although that was not declared