Sadly, I fully agree with Richard Smith's opinion [1] that many medical journals have become marketing offices of pharmaceutical companies. Even worse is that few people seem to realize this, and there are many respectable academics who would wholeheartedly dispute these views. The “psychology of gift” operates in every social environment, being so pervasive because it is based on the profoundly human and universal norm of reciprocity [2,3]. In academia and medical publishing it produces great returns to the pharmaceutical industry via clinical scientists who are not dishonest but in a state of denial about their motivations, as Jerome Kassirer, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, describes very clearly in his recent book [4]. What is happening is also extremely serious because the tainted trials we are offered can make evidence-based medicine a pointless enterprise. Again, something not widely appreciated.
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