An Unworthy Medical Article

Many medical writers (myself included) rely on the peer reviews that respectable medical journals use to check the validity of their articles. So we were startled today to hear from the Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine than an article they published in 2000 contained a deliberate falsification – the omission of three Vioxx-related death reports. It turns out that if these reports had been included, the safety of Vioxx would have been brought into question some years earlier than was in fact the case.

I don’t want to enter into a discussion of the merits/demerits (risks/benefits) of Vioxx here. I just want to issue a small warning. Most new medical news is derived from 3 sources:

1. Reports from medical conferences – the veracity of the information depends on the honesty of the researcher and the reporting of the media correspondent.

2. Press releases from a drug company or a prestigious hospital or research lab. Here one must reckon with a possible element of self-interest or bias.

3. Published reports in so-called peer-reviewed medical journals. This has been judged the most reliable source, to date. We must hope that the Vioxx/New England Journal is just an isolated incident of deliberate fraud; it will almost certainly carry punitive consequences for Merck, the employer of at least one of the authors of the offending article.