Journalistic Fraud Rampant in Professional Medical Journals

An article was recently published (June 29, 2017) in the American Journal of Psychiatry (AJP), the Big Pharma subsidized official journal of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). The article was titled “ADHD Medication and Substance-Related Problems.” The conclusion given in the abstract was that highly addictive, brain-damaging prescription psycho-stimulants that are routinely administered for so-called ADHD are safe. The article was a classic example of a Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO) medical journal article that I have noticed has become commonplace ever since I graduated from medical school in 1968, a decade or two before I first started becoming became aware of journalistic fraud in the pharmaceutical and medical publication industries. Hundreds and thousands of questionable GIGO articles are published annually in professional medical journals which are mailed (or emailed) out to physicians, most of whom are never able to find the time to read and absorb the substance of most of the articles. Marcia Angell, M.D., the fired editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, has written: “...conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”