It would be hard to collect a more fascinating bunch of topics or people in a hotel conference room. The 2013 Selling Sickness conference recently held in Washington, DC was among the most thought provoking and just plain interesting conferences I’ve been to in a long while, and I go to a lot of conferences. This third conference in a string of international conferences (Newcastle, Australia, 2006 and Amsterdam, 2010) was characterised by its organizers as part of “a global reform movement” against the “marketization of health, the corporatization of healthcare, and the hijacking of patient and consumer language to disguise market interests.” Opening speaker Shannon Brownlee identified “the different heads of the hydra” as “disease-mongering, conflict of interest, and overdiagnosis.” In her view, the challenge of this meeting was to identify these aspects of selling sickness and “weave them together in a systemic movement that promotes systemic changes.”
I participated in a roundtable discussion charged with examining the news and communication perspective on disease-mongering, and was joined on the journal side by Jocalyn Clark of PLoS Medicine. Moderator Gary Schwitzer of HealthNews Review and panelist Nancy Shute considered the problem from the vantage of medical journalists. When it came time to examine how medical journals might address their role in selling sickness and disease mongering, I suggested two possible strategies.
First, why not quarantine apparently ground breaking studies about new treatments or interventions in a special journal until the findings are replicated and long term consequences explored? Print copies of the journal would arrive in plain brown wrappers which undone would show the journal’s cover logo of a skull and crossbones. During quarantine, any news stories or summaries of research from this journal would travel with a sternly worded disclaimer, along the lines of those that accompany investment company advertisements. Something like the following would do nicely:
To fill the void, medical journals deprived of these sensational research studies could instead devote themselves to the promotion and prioritization of the less glamorous medical research that really matters: replication studies, comparative effectiveness trials, and long term pharmacosurveillance and safety studies.
My second suggestion was that several parts of a typical research paper are too important to be written by the researchers or anyone else with a vested interest in the outcome of the research. These include the portions where “spin” is mostly likely to enter into the paper, namely the title, abstract, results, and conclusion sections, and any summary or “what this study adds” statements that authors are now sometimes asked to supply. These portions of research papers should instead be written by disinterested parties with subject matter expertise.
I have no illusion that these things will come to pass but I can dream, can’t I? During the question and answer session fellow panelist Nancy Shute turned to me and said “I’m impressed by your radicalism.” I’ll take that as a compliment!
Elizabeth Loder is US research editor, BMJ