By Martha Rosenberg
The Epoch Times

Most people blame direct-to-consumer advertising, especially on TV, for elevating everyday anxiety to depression, depression to bipolar disorder, childhood behavior problems to psychiatric illnesses, lack of sleep to excessive sleepiness, migraines to epilepsy-drug deficiencies, and old age to hormone deficiency.

Ghostwriting also helps promote the national malaise: people suffering from and treating diseases that didn’t exist earlier and ballooning public and private health-plan costs.

There are 200 U.S. medical education and communication companies (MECCs) that ghostwrite medical journal articles for pharma for $20,000 to $40,000 per article. Companies like Complete Healthcare Communications (CHC), whose phalanx of 50 medical writers, editors, and medical directors promise an “84.5 percent acceptance rate for first-time manuscript submissions.”

Ghostwriting was behind the blockbuster Vioxx, withdrawn in 2004 for doubling the risk of heart attacks. “Merck designed the trial, paid for the trial, ran the trial,” Dr. Jeffrey R. Lisse told the New York Times about a Vioxx study he authored in the Annals of Internal Medicine that left out three cardiac deaths.

“Merck came to me after the study was completed and said, ‘We want your help to work on the paper.’ The initial paper was written at Merck, and then it was sent to me for editing,” Lisse said.

Medical journals themselves can make $450,000 off one such ghostwritten article, because pharma orders reprints that reps disseminate as sales pieces (“Look, Doc––it says RIGHT HERE …”).

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See Also: Ghost Writers of Medical Research should be Sued for Fraud Argue Lawyers