1. Medical journals are going the way of newspapers, as in “extinct”
Who remembers newspapers? Pre-smartphone compendiums of world and local events on paper that required reporters to investigate and inform?
When newspapers lost their classified ads, their financial fulcrum, to Craigslist, they lost their readers and reporters. No one could pay staff or printing or distribution without readers and advertisers, and the business model is otiose, especially because of the printing delay which can make news look “old.”
The same thing is happening to medical journals once brimming with drug ads. Except for their back covers which can still sport ads, many medical journals are trying to pay editors, proofreaders, page designers, and printers without the ad revenue they once had, revenue which has gravitated to the direct-to-consumer space.
Losing advertisers on the backdrop of production costs creates another problem for both general and medical news sources: paywalls and subscriber-only content, designed to monetize product, drive away readers in a continued eyeball decline that threatens survival. Fewer and fewer libraries even carry medical journals as their prices rise, for example. Have paywalls helped or harmed news outlets? Ask employees, who are left after they “trained” AI how to do their jobs.
Sadly, many medical journals have replaced their lost ad revenue with clinical trial news. It looks informative and newsworthy on the surface, except that most trials are funded by drugmakers, so they are five or six page ads: no negative results tolerated.
Arguably 90 percent of GLP-1 agonist “benefits” that inspired millions to take the weight-loss drug and drove the Wall Street financial boom came from clinical trial ads run in medical journals which news outlets picked up as “news.”
2. Conflicts of interest are increasingly called “partnerships”
Many are blissfully unaware that the CDC Foundation and Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) even exist, much less that they have funders called drugmaker “partners.” While MDs and other health professionals sometimes lament the “corporatization” of U.S. medicine, AbbVie, Amgen, Biogen, and many other drugmakers enjoyed “private/public partnerships” with government agencies that used to be called conflicts of interest. A poster child for such medical COIs overseas is the Novo Nordisk Research Centre Oxford, situated on the central University Old Road Campus along with the Oxford-GSK Institute of Molecular and Computational Medicine, founded in 2021, another “partnership.”
Can governments “regulate” their financial partners? Should taxpayer money fund research innovation which directly benefits drugmakers? Such ethical-financial questions are seldom asked by a public often unaware of the partnerships.
3. “Behavioral” and gender clinics sponsored by drugmakers
Who hasn’t noticed the proliferation of clinics for behavioral and gender health, often inside hospitals? Some say the very term “behavioral medicine” was invented by drugmakers to negotiate the $23.46 billion a year market for psychiatric drugs in the U.S. The U.S. market for drugs and hormones for gender care is $1.73 billion a year.
Behavioral clinic managers have said, off the record, that their practices are predicated on drug sales and that drug-refusing patients are unwelcome. One unidentified behavioral medicine clinic doctor went so far as to say to a patient, “If you don’t take the meds, we don’t get paid.” Thanks to pesky investigative journalists, drugmaker funding of such clinics is hidden within government grants (see above) and “family” foundations in the last 15 years.
Few pharma clinic funders want their fingerprints visible, except for an occasional Teva, who is reported to provide multi-million dollar grants and anxiety/depression medications to independent community clinics across 10 U.S. states.
Whether “private/public partnerships” with drugmakers in government and universities to PBMs and insurance “partnerships” affecting prescription drug availability, preferences, and prices, the only thing more shocking about such new trends and alliances is their lack of coverage in mainstream media.
Martha Rosenberg is an investigative reporter whose work has appeared in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), Consumer Reports, Public Citizen, the Center for Health Journalism at USC Annenberg, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, and other outlets. She studied at Rush Medical School and writes on health care, food, medicine, and public policy.
Rosenberg’s reporting has been cited by Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Mayo Clinic Proceedings, Public Library of Science Biology, ScienceDirect, the Journal of Pain & Palliative Care Pharmacotherapy, the Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, Britannica, National Geographic, Hastings Law Journal, and Wikipedia. She is the author of several books, including Multidisciplinary Management of Chronic Pain: A Practical Guide for Clinicians, Born With a Junk Food Deficiency, Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Lies, and Food, Clothes, Men, Gas and Other Problems. She publishes on Substack, OpEdNews, and her Amazon author page.
