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, Univ 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.
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 she was getting more and more ghostwritten papers from medical school doctors. A drug company that controls the data and has a ghostwriter writing the paper may neglect to write about the side effects of a drug. It was funded by Wyeth-Ayerst. But before the article could be published, Redux was linked to heart and lung problems and pulled from the market.