Wall-Street-Journal

What start­ed as an aca­d­e­m­ic dis­pute regard­ing dis­clo­sure of con­flict of inter­est is now snow­balling into the main­stream media, due to the over-reac­tion by JAMA edi­tors as report­ed in this Wall Street Jour­nal blog post, JAMA edi­tor calls Crit­ic a “Nobody and a Noth­ing”

In sum­ma­ry, Dr. Jonathan Leo, the “Crit­ic”, dared to draw atten­tion to 2 impor­tant points regard­ing a study com­par­ing the effi­ca­cy of ther­a­py vs. med­ica­tion pub­lished in the Jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Med­i­cine (JAMA) — one of the most pres­ti­gious sci­en­tif­ic publications:

1) The study results were pre­sent­ed and report­ed in a biased way, since they favored one spe­cif­ic inter­ven­tion, a drug, while ignor­ing anoth­er one, ther­a­py-based, that had equal­ly sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant effects.

2) Both the lead author of the study and one of the main experts asked to com­ment on the study in sev­er­al media out­lets had undis­closed and unre­port­ed con­flicts of inter­est. JAMA could have done a 5‑minute Google search to iden­ti­fy and report the con­flict of inter­est of the lead author (received a vari­ety of rev­enues from the drugmaker).

Dr. Leo has sum­ma­rized the con­tin­u­ing mat­ter in sev­er­al impres­sive let­ters. The 2 main ones, in chrono­log­i­cal order:

Clin­i­cal Tri­als of Ther­a­py vs. Med­ica­tion: Even in a Tie, Med­ica­tion Wins(BMJ)

- “Cen­tral to the idea of evi­dence-based med­i­cine is that the choic­es made by patients and doc­tors to use a cer­tain treat­ment should at least in part be based on sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies pub­lished in peer reviewed aca­d­e­m­ic jour­nals. For a patient diag­nosed with [Read more…] about Ther­a­py vs. Med­ica­tion, Con­flicts of Inter­est, and Intimidation