Peer Pressure: Merck + Elsevier

I wrote about this a few posts ago, but NPR: On The Media had a feature yesterday about Merck and Elsevier and their "journal." The story, Peer Pressure, included a couple good interviews and analysis by the On The Media crew. On The Media is one of the best shows on NPR (at least as far as I'm concerned), so I was happy to see they picked up on this particular story. It's definitely worth a listen.

Drug Company Websites

I was doing a little reading tonight and went through a couple studies looking at the websites of pharmaceutical companies. The studies were:

• Griffiths, K. M., Christensen, H., & Evans, K. (2002). Pharmaceutical Company Websites as Sources of Information for Consumers: How Appropriate and Informative Are They? . Disease Management and Health Outcomes, 10(4), 205-214.

• Graber, M. A., & Weckmann, M. (2002). Pharmaceutical Company Internet Sites As Sources of Information About Antidepressant Medications. CNS Drugs, 16(6), 419-423.
  

The first thing I thought upon reading these studies is that some of the methods/results of Internet-oriented studies don't necessarily have the longest shelf life. In one of them they used HotBot.com as a tool for searching the Internet, which I'm pretty sure at this point would be fairly unlikely for most healthcare consumers.

In any case, I think the question about the educational value of pharmaceutical company websites is an interesting one. I have a PhD student who recently collected data looking at what people learn (hopefully) from the Gardasil website, we're just starting to dig into the data right now to see what people thought of the website, what they might have learned from it, etc.

I've never fully grasped when I read research articles on drug advertising when the authors take a combative stance. (I'm not saying either of these articles do that, but I've certainly seen enough of it.) This isn't to say that I necessarily think drug advertising doesn't have some problems, but it seems like good academic research could help improve the quality of drug advertisements. If the end result are better (whatever that might mean) ads that lead to better patient education and compliance, it would seem like everyone wins... Patients learn about their health, drugs to treat health conditions they might have, they're more compliant (aka, increased sales for the companies), and they end up managing their health more successfully.

Anyway, there might not be a real point to this post, just a few random things that came to mind when I was doing a little reading tonight. Here's hoping academics and industry can do a slightly better job working together to improve these ads for the betterment of everyone involved.

Hans Rosling on HIV

One of the highlights at TED each year is Hans Rosling offering another amazing presentation related to public health. This year he talks about HIV around the world, great stuff.

Scientific "Journals"

In an interesting recent development, it looks like Elsevier has bee publishing a couple medical journals that were "advertorial" publications. There is a great discussion about this over at Slashdot, and an article from The Guardian includes this bit:

This time Elsevier Australia went the whole hog, giving Merck an entire publication which resembled an academic journal, although in fact it only contained reprinted articles, or summaries, of other articles. In issue 2, for example, nine of the 29 articles concerned Vioxx, and a dozen of the remainder were about another Merck drug, Fosamax. All of these articles presented positive conclusions. Some were bizarre: such as a review article containing just two references.

This adds quite a new and different element to the challenge of evaluating the quality of research, particularly when it comes to teaching students how to evaluate the quality of different publications. As an example, I don't have quite the same anti-Wikipedia stance as some academics that I know, but I also make it clear to students that Wikipedia can be a great place to start reading about a new topic - but the most valuable aspect of Wikipedia are the links to relevant references at the end of an article. Suggesting that peer-reviewed research is the gold standard against which other publications should be measured becomes slightly murkier when something like this hits the mainstream media.

I guess that's what I find to be most troubling about this entire story... Is it bad that Elsevier did this? Of course. Will it impact how people look at all Elsevier publications? I'd assume so. But what does it do the credibility of peer-reviewed academic journals more generally? We'll see where it goes...

(Unrelated to this post, it feels REALLY good to be back after surviving the NIH Challenge Grant process. Hopefully I'll have good news to post here in a few months!)