Scientific+Publications+and+Propaganda

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The medical community wholly relies on the spread of information. Innovations are being made in the scientific community everyday which must be effectively publicized in order for them to truly aid doctors on large scale. Because of this need, journals for the medical community are consistently published to inform doctors on advancements in pharmaceuticals ect. These are called scientific publications and they too have been used as a medium of propaganda.

From what we know about the importance of information spread in the medical community, we can assume that corruption in this area results with dire consequences. Journalists like Melody Petersen explain how through advertising agencies, pharmaceutical companies use doctors to write material to promote their drug and how this ultimately harms society. Petersen tells us that this is such a major issue, that many doctors consider some scientific publications to be propaganda and refuse to read the publications all together. Much like how abstinence from voting harms a democracy, refusal to read scientific publications from doctors halts the progress of medical advancement.

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In order for pharmaceutical companies to promote their drug in scientific publications, they must have doctors willing to write and sponsor articles for them. There are many ways to wrangle a physician into writing an article however in most cases; the easiest way is to get them on the company’s payroll. This is done through advertising companies, who have specific strategies for taking doctors under their influence. Advertising agencies use methods like creating a web-presence, holding informative seminars, mailing lists, and even offering doctors a chance to benefit from the drug during its clinical trial (essentially a ticket to recognition upon the drug’s success). After this has been accomplished, these doctors write propaganda for scientific publications. While there are more reputable scientific publications available, the number of potentially corrupt journals surpass it.



In its most basic form, propaganda in scientific publications appears as articles that promote a drug that are sponsored by an advertising agency for the purpose of changing a physician’s prescribing methods. These include drug-awareness articles, articles to raise attention to a medical condition that the drug treats, clinical studies observations, selected data sets, and anything else that would alter a doctor’s medical opinion for malicious reasons. What separates these advertisements from legitimate articles is that one can trace back the organizations associated with the author to their source (the source determining whether or not the article is legitimate). Because of the arduous process associated with this, it is difficult for doctors to sift through the articles and as a function of that, more and more doctors are abandoning reading certain scientific publications altogether.