A new study found that the most prominent medical journals primarily use peer reviewers who have received, in total, over $1 billion dollars from the pharmaceutical/device industry in just three years.
The researchers looked at the 2022 peer reviewer list for the four top medical journals, The BMJ, JAMA, The Lancet, and The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). More than half (58.9%) of the peer reviewers received payments from the pharmaceutical/device industry, including 54% who received general payments and 31.8% who received research funding.
In total, industry spent $1.06 billion on these peer reviewers between 2020 and 2022, the majority of which was research funding ($1 billion), along with $64.18 million considered general payments.
“Although conflicts of interest of journal editors and authors have been investigated, the traditionally opaque nature of peer review has hindered their evaluation among peer reviewers, despite their crucial role in academic publishing. While most journals have established conflict of interest policies for authors, fewer extend these policies to peer reviewers,” the researchers write.
The research was led by David-Dan Nguyen, a urologist at the University of Toronto, and Anju Muramaya at the Department of Population Health Science and Policy, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (also affiliated with Tohoku University). The article was published in JAMA.
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The original medicine woman or man of traditional cultures was not profiteering out of other people’s medical misfortunes, but roll on two thousand years and there is a vast army of already wealthy grifters milking the system for everything they can possibly get there hands on, including high social esteem based on false appearances and extensively deceptive propaganda. Medical journals enjoy a supreme esteem in the eyes of the general public, but it seems that all social actors are becoming mercilessly vampiric and usurping as we enter the final days of our destructive civilization.
So as well as destroying our health, the social process uses the opportunity to go on and strip us of every penny they can extract from us when we seek medical help to patch up our injuries. And we all know there is no economic incentive in developing actual cures, unless they are prohibitively expensive. Any promising treatments that can’t make money don’t attract funding in the first place, so medicine is not an academic discipline any more AT ALL. It’s a business, and that is part of the general destruction of the human truth-seeking spirit as it abandoned the effort to understand reality for the pursuit of power through wealth and/or technology.
In your country they manage to extract 10 times as much for insulin as they do in other countries from every single diabetic and given that owing to poor diet and stressful lives diabetes is much more concentrated in deprived communities, insulin rationing among the poor is an epidemic in America that can lead to life changing deterioration or prove fatal like so many other American pathologies – school shootings, all manor of shootings, suicides, fentanyl. If you compare the state of America to post-Soviet Russia, on the whole the state of America would seem to predict an even worse long-term outcome by far. But the worst thing of all about it is that even though these grifters in the medical and pharmacological and psychiatry industries do it almost in plain sight, our social conditioning, which normalizes all these appalling pathologies and injustices mean citizens end up being grinning idiots who accept everything the social process throws at them, including becoming homeless because you can’t afford the rip of prices for insulin or cancer treatment. And we also accept the cololinization and destruction of our whole lives, our children’s futures, and the whole Earth which used to be ours before it was taken over by huge corporations called nations and scarred by private corporations and their money making industries which enslave us to a wage slave society where we have to commit our whole lives to private interests in order to put food on our table. But nations are just the same as private corporations: they are vast extractive enterprises run in the interests of those with power and wealth. We are really factory farm animals who feed ourselves and our children into the labour machine which destroys and pillages the Earth and our lives for everything they can extract. Only very sick people could want this grotesque system to continue and this includes almost all of us today.
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Well said, No-one.
Most of us are groomed to be slaves to a mercilessly extractive system built by and for the privileged few from the time we’re born to the time we die; all the while being expected to applaud our own destruction, physically, mentally and spiritually.
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And what is the primary role of the mental health industry (along with its venal enablers in the media, academia, so-called regulatory bodies, pharmaceutical companies, etc.) in this mercilessly extractive, relentlessly exploitative, thoroughly corrupt system?
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I think it functions as a way to use people inappropriately.
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I’m in touch with my feminine side, so I am. Indeed I’m ringing it’s neck right now.
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My jaw still drops when I read of the corruption inherent to capitalism. This level of corruption and bribery will not just be in medicine, it will be in all areas of the economy.
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I think for the most part it already is.
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Sadly, you’re right, John. The corruption is not just within the medical and big Pharma industries … best I can tell, from my many decades of research into many of the systemic problems within industries is … it’s pretty much systemic, avarice inspired corruption, within all the so called “professions.”
Thank you, Peter, for your continued honest reporting of the systemic crimes of the psy industries and big Pharma.
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It’s all about getting drugs on the market; it doesn’t matter if medical doctors are involved. For the most part, medicine’s veneer of integrity is just that, a veneer. Pharmaceutical and insurance money is most of what runs the show. More drugs mean more money for them. People’s health be damned.
Significant change won’t happen unless and until the public becomes aware of the significant risks involved in taking psychiatric drugs, something that usually only happens after they are seriously affected.
A similar thing happened to the cigarette industry where a lot of people had to get seriously sick or even die before anyone paid attention.
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“Peer review” in psychiatric journalism is a joke; it’s just a sophisticated form of disinformation.
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Given that at most 9-30 million people, mostly children, die every year owing to malnutrition and starvation, I calculate that the wealth of one billionaire could pay for enough food to keep this many people alive for a whole year. How many billionaire’s do you have in America? Isn’t it about 500? So if we liquidised just one of these pigs each year, no mother would have to lose her child again because of want of food.
Global hunger is so cheep to solve. The unconscious but patent truth is that for us the lives of those who die in other countries are no more important then our factory farm animals, and if they were obviously we’d be sending these animals to the third world in order to rescue these people. And for the same reason we’re not going to do anything about climate change – we’re going to let the world burn and hope we die before we see our children plunge into the abyss. Proof is in the pudding guys.
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