Why People Think That the Medical Establishment Is Corrupt

It's not because people just don't trust science, it's because the medical establishment is corrupt.

Case in point:  After acknowledging the problem for decades, medical journals are still not requiring authors fully disclose financial conflicts. 

To be fair, everything is corrupt, this is what end stage capitalism looks like:

A new analysis finds that 81 percent of authors whose work appeared in the Journal of American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine in 2017 failed to disclose conflicts of interest in the form of industry payments. 

The analysis reviewed 31 clinical trial reports from each of the two journals that were published in 2017 and identified 118 authors who, in total, received $7.48 million dollars in industry payments. The payment information came from Open Payments, a US government website where drug and device makers must report payments to physicians and health care providers. The analysis was posted as a preprint on medRxiv on January 1 and has not yet been peer-reviewed. 

Of the 118 authors on the included papers, only a dozen did not receive any payments, according to the preprint. Of the 106 researchers who received payments, the payments ranged from as little as $6.36 to as much as $1.49 million. Researchers received payments for travel, food, speaking, and consulting services, among other things, STAT News reports. The 23 researchers that received the largest payments received a total of $6.32 million, of which $3 million was undisclosed.

………

When publishing in ICMJE member journals, which includes JAMA and NEJM, researchers are required to follow the disclosure guidelines promoted by the ICMJE—which include disclosing payments. But this expectation was not met by many of the authors of the papers included in the analysis. According to STAT, the authors of the preprint say that their results suggest voluntary disclosure may not be adequate for avoiding financial conflicts or ensuring transparency.

It's not just the authors though, the editors of these august publications are taking lots of industry money too. 

Corruption is as corruption does, I guess.