Medical Writing Good Pharma Good pharma

Volume 22, Issue 4 - Good Pharma

Good pharma

Drugs companies publish only a fraction of their results and keep much of the information to themselves. Drug companies are ‘debasing’ drug trials whose publication in journals can apparently confer scientific approval. Merck had fought for years to cover up evidence linking its painkiller Vioxx to heart attacks and strokes. Some treatments on the market have been linked to fatal side effects. Companies run bad trials on their own drugs, which distort and exaggerate the benefits by design. When these trials produce unflattering results, the data is simply buried. Patient groups who are in the pay of the pharmaceutical industry will go into battle for them. There's a hidden agenda here.

Not my words, I hasten to add. All the sentences in the above paragraph are taken from articles in just one UK newspaper (the Guardian, in case you were wondering). These are just a few examples of how it's become quite fashionable to believe that Evil Big Pharma are one of the most dangerous bad guys in the modern world.

Medical Writing is grateful to Kim Goldin and the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP) for working with us to produce this issue. More about ISMPP can be found on page 272. We hope that this issue marks the beginning of a mutually beneficial collaboration between our two associations.

The reality, of course, is rather more complicated.

Sure, there have been times when pharmaceutical companies have done bad things. I don't think any sensible person would attempt to defend, for example, Pfizer's behaviour in marketing Neurontin for off-label uses, which resulted in them being fined $430 million. But in the same way that we don't conclude that all doctors are evil because of Harold Shipman, it would be very shoddy thinking to conclude that a few tales of bad practice show the pharma industry in general to be a force for evil.

The fact is that the pharmaceutical industry has been responsible for amazing advances in healthcare for many decades. When I was at primary school, one of my classmates died of leukaemia. Today, a primary school child with leukaemia has an excellent chance of survival thanks to modern chemotherapy.1 The 10-year survival rates for many adult cancers have doubled since I was at primary school;2 again, thanks in no small part to advances made by the pharmaceutical industry.

And it's not just cancer treatment that has improved: many EMWA members are probably too young to remember just how serious gastric ulcers could be before the era of modern acid-suppressive drugs, but for people of my parents’ generation, a gastric ulcer was a serious illness with dramatic effects on quality of life, for which the only effective treatment was often surgery. Nowadays, most gastric ulcers can be successfully treated just by taking a few pills for a few weeks.

Nonetheless, there is undoubtedly great sport to be had in criticising the pharma industry, or ‘pharmaism’, as Wendy Kingdom explains on page 262. Wendy suggests that one possible reason for this may be that pharma companies make money out of treating disease, which some people find distasteful. Nonetheless, any economist will tell you that desirable activities need to be profitable; otherwise, why would anyone bother to do them in the first place? An alternative, state-run model of drug development was of course tried in the Soviet Union, which resulted in a list of therapeutic advances that would fit ‘on the back of a stamp’.3

Because it is so fashio

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References

  1. Kantarjian H, O'Brien S, Cortes J, Wierda W, Faderl S, Garcia-Manero G, et al. Therapeutic advances in leukemia and myelodysplastic syndrome over the past 40 years. Cancer 2008;113(supplement 7):1933–1952.
  2. Cancer Research UK. Long-term survival from once-deadly cancers doubles [press release]. Available from: http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/news/archive/pressrelease/2010-07-12-deadly-cancer-survival-doubles
  3. Schachter M. A sunshine act for Europe: spare me the English middle class's snobbery about trade [Letter]. BMJ 2011;343:d7026.
  4. Jacobs A. Bias in papers about bias [weblog]. Available from: http://dianthus.co.uk/bias-in-papers-about-bias
  5. acobs A. Cochrane review on industry sponsorship [weblog]. Available from: http://dianthus.co.uk/cochrane-review-on-industry-sponsorship

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Articles

Good pharma
Message from the President
Transparency and the healthcare industry: The Sun is shining
Sunshine spreading across the Atlantic and over Europe
Bad karma
If a misinformed voice speaks out in the wilderness and no one refutes it, does it make a sound? A call to advocacy
The Big Pharma conspiracy theory
Editorial: Pharmaism
Legal remedies for medical ghostwriting: Imposing fraud liability on guest authors of ghostwritten articles
A decade of change: A new ISMPP has arrived
Selling evidence over the counter: Do community pharmacists engage with evidence-based medicine?
Good regulatory practice and the role(s) of a regulatory affairs professional
Profile: An interview with Dr Gustavo A. Silva on the concept of public health in medical writing and translation
AuthorAID: An international service and chance to serve
India as a hub for ethical and evidence-based medical communications
Providing value for medicines in older people
In the Bookstores
Journal Watch
The Webscout
Regulatory Writing
Medical Communications
Manuscript Writing
Out On Our Own
Erratum
The Light Stuff

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Editoral Board

Editor-in-Chief

Raquel Billiones

Co-Editors

Evguenia Alechine

Jonathan Pitt

Managing Editor

Victoria White

Associate Editors

Anuradha Alahari

Jennifer Bell

Nicole Bezuidenhout

Claire Chang

Barbara Grossman

Sarah Milner

John Plant

Sampoorna Rappaz

Amy Whereat

Section Editors

Daniela Kamir

AI/Automation

Jennifer Bell

Biotechnology

Nicole Bezuidenhout 

Digital Communication

Somsuvro Basu

EMWA News 

Ana Sofia Correia 

Gained in Translation

Ivana Turek

Getting Your Foot in the Door

Wendy Kingdom / Amy Whereat

Good Writing Practice

Alison McIntosh 

In the Bookstores

Maria Kołtowska-Häggström

Lingua Franca and Beyond

Maddy Dyer

Publications

Lisa Chamberlain-James

Medical Communications/Writing for Patients

Payal Bhatia

Medical Devices

Evguenia Alechine

My First Medical Writing

Anuradha Alahari

News from the EMA

Adriana Rocha

Out on Our Own

Tiziana von Bruchhausen

Pharmacovigilance

Clare ChangZuo Yen Lee 

Regulatory Matters

Sam Hamilton

Regulatory Public Disclosure

Claire Gudex

Teaching Medical Writing

Louisa Ludwig-Begall / Sarah Kabani

The Crofter: Sustainable Communications

Louisa Marcombes

Veterinary Writing

Editors Emeritus

Elise Langdon-Neuner

Phil Leventhal

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Chris Monk