Inside the corporate takeover of medical journals

Note 1. I updated this at 8 AM on 4th August 2026 to include links to quotes, and expanded Drummond Rennie’s quote.

Note 2. There’s an AI-generated audio version of this here:

The other day I met a doctor with over 40 years experience in both the clinical and academic spheres. He was with me on many issues of the day, including the poor quality of science being conducted, the criminal nature of the transgender movement, overdiagnosis and so on.

He was even with me that the pharmaceutical industry was basically corrupt.

However, when I put it to him that there is in fact virtually no mainstream science that could be trusted, he pushed back.

I wonder if he’s aware of the views of those who have been in the best possible position to observe the corrupt nature of medical science - mainstream medical journal editors.

Here are just a few notable quotes:

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”

…from her 2009 essay “Drug Companies & Medicine: How Tidily They Dance” in The New York Review of Books. (I also downloaded as a PDF here in case that link is inaccessible.)

“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”

…from a 2015 editorial for The Lancet.

“Medical journals are an extension of the marketing arm of pharmaceutical companies... Trials funded by drug companies rarely produce unfavourable results and make up between two thirds and three quarters of the trials published in key journals.”

….from a 2005 essay for PLoS Medicine.

In a 2021 piece for the BMJ, Smith took an even harsher stance on health research integrity, writing:

“It may be time to stop assuming that research actually happened and is honestly reported, and assume that the research is fraudulent until there is some evidence to support it having happened and been honestly reported.”

It has been clear for at least two decades that, when clinical researchers have a financial stake in the results, it opens the door to a pervasive distortion of science (Rennie 2007). When a drug company sponsors a trial, the company employees usually select the drug tested, its dose, and the comparison drug. Company employees design the trial, often to produce the result they desire rather than to answer a scientific question. They have a powerful and fateful role in managing the trial, sometimes stopping it for reasons unrelated to science and despite any commitment to the trial participants (Psaty and Rennie 2003). They may even suppress the results completely (Rennie 1997).

From a 2007 essay in Health Services Research.

Thus the whole system is built on trust. Trust depends on there being someone accountable……I soon learned from repeated, bitter personal experience that, when scientists had a great deal at stake, some were prepared, in the name of prestige, to take short cuts, falsify, fabricate, plagiarize, bamboozle, lie, cheat, and throw away their reputations simply to notch up more publications, advance their careers and, of course, make more money

…from a piece he wrote for Journal of Law and Policy in 2008.

If you have any further examples, please put them into a comment below.