As a heart attack survivor and a 2008 graduate of the Mayo Clinic Science & Leadership Symposium for Women with Heart Disease, I’m spitting mad about this – particularly when I read things like “discrepancies between the outcomes registered and the outcomes published.”

As a practising PR professional for the past 36 years, I’m also gobsmacked at the clear lack of awareness about how damaging these kinds of reports are to the reputations of medical journals, researchers, funding agencies and indeed the medical profession itself. Are any of you paying any attention to this?

And on top of the growing coverage of the Wyeth Pharmaceuticals/medical ghostwriting scandal, what this means to your average heart patient cannot be underestimated.

For example, like many heart attack survivors, I now take a fistful of meds each day. How many of these drugs became widely prescribed after my doctors read and believed medical journal articles covering tainted research, or inadequately registered trials, or Big Pharma-funded product marketing campaign material masquerading as scientific papers? I am disgusted and dismayed – and also very afraid for my future health.

In the end, credibility is all that medical research has going for it, and there seems to be precious little of that going around these days.

Trust the literature? You must be kidding.

Carolyn Thomas
http://www.myheartsisters.org