Essentially the editors for the most prestigious scientific Journals in the U.S. and perhaps the world are calling half their work out on the mat as bogus. This fact must result in needless death at some level due to the unmitigated fall out -- misdirection, delay, etc. At what point is there culpability for cheating in scientific reviews. Real culpability?
I had heard this once before but it was to scary for my brain to absorb. On the bright side we do see people living longer with cancer. Big Pharma has deep pockets and reach far. Time for another clean up like in Bush administration.
It is telling that Dr Horton and Dr Angell, former editors of two of the most prestigious medical journals, wrote books decrying the corruption of medicine as soon as they left their posts.
Here are two more — seems to be a growing cottage industry:
Dr Jerome Kassirer, former Editor-in-Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine and
Dr Richard Smith, a previous editor of the British Medical Journal for twenty five years.
Looks like one has to get out a magnifying glass, a slide rule and the most state-of-the-art bullshit detector one can find when reading the odd prestigious medical journal these days.
This dilemma (trust authority and be regularly misled or take on the Herculean task of rolling up ones sleeves to fact-check everything) reminds me of a quote by Chomsky on developing “courses of intellectual self-defense” in the context of social change movements — short but thought provoking as a potential way forward if adapted patient advocacy groups that don’t take corporate sponsorship: