Shill considered.

• Author: Turner, Barry
• Position: Letters - Letter to the Editor

I could not agree more with Shannon Brownlee's excellent article "Doctors Without Borders" (April) on why we should not trust medical journals. Although I once required my students to restrict their research to the journals as the only authoritative source, I now tell them to read journals with caution.

I have been researching drug-company-sponsored articles for four years. It is sad that patients cannot trust the very people who are supposed to be caring for them and that supposedly objective scientific studies cannot be relied upon to give accurate information about pharmaceutical products.

Barry Turner

Department of Biological Sciences

University of Lincoln London, England

"Doctors Without Borders" is a great piece of journalism on a disturbing topic. As an anthropologist who lectures on ethical research in most of my courses, I have never before discussed ethics in the context of publication of research. I will now. You have given me some nourishing lecture fodder.

Raymond Hames

Professor of Anthropology

University of Nebraska Lincoln, Neb,

Shannon Brownlee's article about conflict of interest in the pharmaceutical industry and medical science is dead on. My child has regressive autism and once we started looking into the possible causes (i.e. vaccines, mercury, etc) and began to really scrutinize the research, we learned to distrust any data that comes from drug companies. Hopefully the recent cover-up of antidepressant studies will force the CDC and FDA to rethink their evaluation of new drugs. Unfortunately, because of the skeptic that I have become, I doubt it. They do have their own jobs to protect.

Cynthia Zahoruk

Via email

I enjoyed very much Shannon Brownlee's article and agree that those who write editorials should not accept industry money, and that full disclosure is very important. I do take issue with three things she wrote. First, regarding her comparison of expensive calcium-channel blockers for hypertension with "over-the counter" diuretics: The diuretics are inexpensive and very effective, but do require a prescription. Second, her assertion that a cholesterol-lowering drug may simply cause muscles and kidneys to break down rather than benefit a patient is misleading and factually incorrect. Statin drugs risk liver failure, not kidney failure. Moreover, there is no doubt that among certain groups of people--those at very high risk for heart disease and those with known heart disease--statin drugs save lives by reducing...