Yet, Wyeth kept providing to medical journals more ghostwritten articles by doctors on topics that supported the benefits of HRT. It wasn’t until a study as part of the massive Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) showed that the drugs to treat menopause symptoms were actually putting women at higher risk for breast cancer and heart disease that the public took notice.

By then, Wyeth had made billions on its HRT drugs Premarin and Prempro. Thousands of women have taken Wyeth to court demanding justice. But what about the articles in archived medical journals? Martha Rosenberg, a columnist featured in OpEdNews says the articles should be retracted. “Plagiarism, ‘unethical research’ and unreliable findings from ‘fabricated data’ are grounds for retraction of medical journal articles according to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE),” she writes. “But one look at the US National Library of Medicine database reveals that bogus, ghostwritten papers Wyeth planted in medical journals in a scandal which reached the U.S. Congress last year still stand, unretracted.

“Hormone therapy represents one of the largest swaths of preventable injuries to healthy citizens in recent history with thousands of women developing cancer and other deadly side effects. Yet Wyeth/Pfizer maintains it doesn’t know how the idea that hormone therapy could prevent heart disease and dementia and provide other ‘benefits’ ever got started.”

SOURCE: Hormone Replacement Therapy › Ghostwritten medical journal articles about HRT should be retracted