Eli Lilly has come under fire recently for the manner in which they’ve marketed Zyprexa, a popular antipshycotic drug. Bloomberg reports that Eli Lilly was writing journal articles supporting Zyprexa, and then paying doctors to sign their names to the articles. Internal documents reveal that the company even went to the extent of creating a guide to hiring doctors for this kind of practice, and complained to editors when the articles weren’t published, this after Lilly stated that they aimed to make Zyprexa the best-selling psychotropic in history.
For one thing, this is a major breach in the integrity of medical journals. False information in journals could have potentially affected the way the drug is used, increasing the number of conditions and patients it could be prescribed for. It should be noted that other drug companies like Merck and Pfizer have been accused of using ghostwritten journal articles too. Who knows how much of the medical literature is now tainted with industry-produced data. The FDA does not have any regulations against the practice currently. Journals themselves should certainly ban publication by any of the doctors linked to this scandal. And drug companies should be forced to reveal which articles they’ve produced, so that any false and dangerous data can be removed from the archives of medical literature.
For more, see the Bloomberg story, and this story in USA Today.
