Plagiarism, "unethical research" and unreliable findings from "fabricated data" are grounds for retraction of medical journal articles according to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
But one look at the US National Library of Medicine database reveals that bogus, ghostwritten papers Wyeth (now Pfizer) planted in medical journals in a scandal which reached the US Congress last year, still stand, unretracted.
"Is there an association between hormone replacement therapy and breast cancer?" asks an unretracted article in the Journal of Women's Health, 1998 Dec;7(10):1231-46--a question a fourth grader could answer in the affirmative.
The "author" William T. Creasman, MD, neither wrote or initiated the article but was suggested by Jeff Solomon of Wyeth, according to documents posted on the University of California, San Francisco's Drug Industry Document Archive (Dida) http://dida.library.ucsf.edu.
The article which finds--surprise--no "definitive evidence" of a cancer link was written by an operative of DesignWrite, Wyeth's marketing firm, named Karen Mittleman.
How about Wyeth's "The role of hormone replacement therapy in the prevention of postmenopausal heart disease," in the Archives of Internal Medicine, 2000 Aug;14-28;160(15):2263-72--a role medical professionals agree should be none at all since hormone therapy increases cardio risks?
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