Publish or Perish: a gravy train

The world of medical science is awash with predatory journals, and they seem especially prevalent in the USA. You may have seen my previous interactions with Global Advances in Health and Medicine, a journal which publishes any kind of quackery you care to invent. Then last week, I received this puzzling email from The Gazette of Medical Sciences:

The Charity Commission Consultation

Most readers should be aware that the Charity Commission has issued a consultation on the registration of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) organisations as charities. This was after a five-year battle documented in other posts on this blog. In the interests of transparency I am posting my response here.

Clinical Trials – better outside the European Union?

Angus Dalgleish, Professor of Oncology at St George’s, University of London, claims in the Daily Telegraph that “Brexit means we can revive clinical trials killed by the EU”. Departing slightly from my usual theme of pseudoscience, I would like to point out where Professor Dalgleish might be mistaken.

Paying the Piper

That guardian of all that’s self-righteous about quackery, the magazine and website What Doctors Don’t Tell You, has its ire well stoked this week. The editors reveal that the famous Clinical Trials Service Unit (CTSU) at Oxford University is funded by the pharmaceutical industry. This apparently is the result of tireless investigation by`nutritionist and wholefood campaigner’ Zoë Harcombe. Not you will note a dietician, but a nutritionist, a title that almost anyone seems qualified to hold these days. I can boil an egg, so I’m a nutritionist. “You got an ology?” But enough of flippancy.

The Myth of Big Pharma

Forty years ago this year (god, can it be so long?), I joined the pharmaceutical industry. Its reputation then was little better then than it is now, various companies having weathered scandals in the previous two decades. In the 1950s Pfizer was top UK company by a long way, on the back of its tetracycline antibiotics. Oxytetracycline was promoted via golf weekends for doctors, and a dimpled ball emblazoned with the brand name Terramycin was famously brandished in the House of Commons in the late 1960s by Gwyneth Dunwoody MP. Not many years later I was working for Pfizer, and doctors still asked me for golf balls, I suspect only half in jest. In the 1960s Roche was forced to repay excessive profits from benzodiazepine anxiolytics, and of course the now long gone Distillers Company presided over the worst ever case of teratogenic damage from a drug.

I’m the Doctor – or am I?

Around the end of 2012 I was alerted  to the claims which Dr Jessica Middleton was making on her website, which she calls The Natural Doctor. A central issue was that Dr Middleton (now Dr Braid – see below) was clearly trading as a medical doctor, as evidenced by the name of her business, and the use of her medical degrees on the opening page of the site. However she does not practise anything which might be called conventional medicine, preferring to offer a wide range of diagnostics and `treatments’ which mostly lack robust evidence. I don’t intend to provide a detailed critique of what is on offer, as my purpose with this post is to explore how such a doctor is regulated. Meanwhile, I’m sure some of you will have your own views about an apparently intelligent young woman who was extensively educated in medicine, to a large extent at public expense, and now chooses not to utilise any of that training in service to the public.

Too Impressed by their own Cleverness?

This is a rather belated review of the book Tarnished Gold: The Sickness of Evidence-based Medicine, by Steve Hickey and Hilary Roberts. It was published in 2011, and my attention was drawn to it when I was asked to comment on its claims, from the viewpoint of an experienced clinical research specialist. Otherwise, I don’t think I would have heard of it, as it hasn’t made any impact in my professional field. In the event, it took me very little time to see why that is the case. The review may appear to meander back and forth between concepts, but that’s because it follows the book, which does the same. So apologies for the repetition.

The Burzynski Soap Opera

Burzynski’s Export Drive

The saga of Dr Stanislaw Burzynski and his antineoplastons (ANPs) is in danger of turning into a soap opera. Well actually it probably already has, as it has gone on for decades with no real plot and no end in sight. Many bloggers have been as puzzled as I as to why the US regulator, the FDA, allows this to continue. Admittedly, from time to time the FDA takes some sort of action, but it is never decisive – he is always allowed to carry on charging desperate patients vast sums to receive an unproven drug.

Is Pharma all Bad?

As many readers will know (do I have many readers?) most of my working life has been spent with Big Pharma. I make no apology for that. It suits me, as it’s science based, with a mission to benefit humanity – at a profit. So imagine my grief that a book such as Ben Goldacre’s latest should be necessary. I haven’t read Bad Pharma yet, but knowing Ben as I do, I have no doubt that there’s more than a kernel of truth to it. Indeed I know that to be the case.

Is the FDA Protecting Burzynski?

And if so, why? Last night is had a phone call with Elisabeth Lee, Regulatory Counsel, Division of Information Disclosure Policy at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.