I am familiar with the bias in medical journals favoring drug companies and their patented drugs, but I was shocked yesterday when I heard this report explaining that Elsevier, the most prominent and respected publisher of medical journals, published several faux journals – regularly published advertisements for drug companies marketed and designed to look like peer reviewed medical journals.
This NPR On the Media segment also explains that a substantial amount of many medical journals’ income comes from republished journal articles with positive findings on new drugs that are distributed to physicians by pharmaceutical companies to increase prescriptions and sales.
I suppose that even evidence based medicine can have its flaws. For more about this, see my podcast of Evidence Based Medicine.
Be Well,
Richard