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Plaintiffs’ lawyers challenge medical ghostwriters

Plaintiffs’ lawyers challenge medical ghostwriters

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Plaintiffs’ attorneys are beginning to challenge the practice of medical ghostwriting, in which doctors lend their names to medical marketing literature, according to an article published in the medical journal Public Library of Science.

The practice has been uncovered during discovery in products liability litigation over drugs that plaintiffs allege are dangerous, including Neurontin, Paxil, Zoloft, Fen-phen, Vioxx and Prempro.

According to one of the article’s co-authors, Bijan Esfandiari, a Los Angeles plaintiffs’ attorney, pharmaceutical companies hire professional authors to write articles with a certain slant – such as favorably summarizing clinical trials or promoting off-label uses – and then shop the finished articles to doctors at prestigious institutions to lend credibility to their conclusions.

The articles are used by drug companies’ sales force to market drugs to treating physicians, who often decide prescribe medication in reliance on the medical names on an article, Esfandiari said.

“It’s cheating. It’s like a student who sends someone else to take a test for them,” said Esfandiari, an attorney with Baum, Hedlund, Aristei & Goldman.

Esfandiari advocates holding doctors who act as “guest writers” liable for fraud by naming them as defendants in personal injury suits over the drugs, or bringing claims under  the federal False Claims Act for inducing Medicare reimbursement or anti-kickback statutes if the doctors received compensation.

So far, he is aware of only one case in which plaintiffs’ attorneys have named ghostwriting doctors as defendants, a suit over the drug Risperdal in Philadelphia.

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