WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, GUILLAUME CARELS
In August, we proposed, in an article in PLoS Medicine, that medical “guest writers” might be sued for fraud. For some time, commentators have called for sanctions against academic doctors who agree to sign their names to articles that are planned and developed by medical writing companies and pharmaceutical manufacturers. Some have even called these practices fraudulent, but have not confronted the legal difficulties with that approach—namely that the grounds for fraud are hard to establish: those who have been harmed by the drugs (the patients) are unlikely to have read the article, and therefore cannot claim to have believed that the “guest” was the true author, while the doctors who found the article persuasive are unlikely to have used the drug themselves.
We argue ...
