Today’s Managing Health Care Costs Number is $6500
Stanton Glantz is the UCLA law professor who broke open the “tobacco papers” case, showing that “big tobacco” had suppressed information about the addictiveness and medical harm caused by cigarettes. Glantz and colleagues have a paper in JAMA Internal Medicine last week using archived documents from the Sugar Research Foundation, “big sugar,” showing that it purchased the services of Harvard researchers to put their fingers on the scale about whether sugar or fat is worse in our diets. This led to the world of low fat everything – and nutritional landmines like “Snackwell” cookies that were devoid of fat (and taste) but filled with extra carbohydrates.
Big Sugar paid two Harvard School of Public Health (!) researchers $6500 in 1967, the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars. In exchange, the researchers wrote a literature review published in 1967 in the New England Journal of Medicine which overstated the dangers of fat, and dismissed research that showed the danger of carbohydrates. One of the researchers went on to help develop the food pyramid – which has been used to create the model diet for a generation.
It’s stunning how little it cost to purchase this influence. The good news is that procedures at academic institutions and at top tier journals have improved substantially. Authors must declare any potential conflicts, and peer review has improved. Even so, this is deeply distressing.
This isn’t the only story of how little it takes to purchase opinions that can be published in peer reviewed journals. The New York Times reported today that Mylan Pharmaceuticals paid ghostwriters to pen an editorial promoting making EpiPen a “preventive” medicine – which would mean that consumers would have no copayment. A family medicine physician (who is also a paid consultant of Mylan) is listed as the author.
Mylan also paid a total about a quarter of a million dollars to ‘patient advocacy’ groups that are advocating to make EpiPen a preventive medication. That’s the equivalent of the revenue from under 400 prescriptions. They might not prevail – but the price of a purchasing influence remains very small indeed!
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