Wyeth hired a middleman, a company called Excerpta Medica, to write and get published nine medical journal articles on Redux. Excerpta paid doctors to review and sign the articles, then submitted them to journals with no mention of Wyeth. Excerpta claims it told the doctors that Wyeth was behind all of it. But Dr. Richard Atkinson, a professor of medicine and nutritional sciences and the director of the Beers-Murphy Clinical Nutrition Center at the University of Wisconsin Madison Medical School, says he wasn't told. He reviewed and signed one of those Redux papers thinking Excerpta was an independent researcher, he says.
Biased literature can make a drug sound better or safer than it really is.
And unbeknownst to most doctors, it's even finding its way into the most respected medical journals. Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, says that as time passed she was getting more and more ghostwritten papers. It was funded by Wyeth-Ayerst. Yet Wyeth's middleman, Excerpta Medica, claims it doesn't ghostwrite. But before the article could be published, Redux was linked to heart and lung problems and pulled from the market.