Media Doesn't Often Mention Pharma Funding on Research

Oct. 1 -- TUESDAY, Sept. 30 (HealthDay News) -- The mainstream media often fail to report when drug company funding is used for studies of medications, a new review found.

What's more, there's a tendency among both medical and mainstream reporters to use brand names, rather than generic names, when referring to specific medications.

And both of these factors work to skew public and medical opinion toward commercial interests, according to the review, published in the Oct. 1 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

This, despite newspaper editors' assertions to the contrary, the study authors found.

"As a doctor, I am increasingly worried in recent years that company-funded research can't be trusted in the same way that other research can be trusted," said study author Dr. Michael Hochman, a resident physician at Cambridge Health Alliance in Cambridge, Mass. "[Also], all of us, doctors, patients, journalists, have gotten into a bad habit of referring to medications by their proprietary brand names. At a philosophical level, I think we need to be referring to them by the generic name. We want to keep commercial interests as much out of the doctor-patient relationship as possible."

"Funding sources should be included in every story where it's relevant," added Andrew Holtz, past president of the Association of Health Care Journalists, former CNN medical correspondent and now an independent journalist. But, he also pointed out, the new study itself may be biased because it only included in its analysis stories of at least 200 words.

"Two hundred words is not a very long story and I didn't see in the study anything about whether there was a correlation between length of article and how thorough the article was in mentioning funding and generic and brand names," Holtz said. Such stories, he added, may be leaving out other important information as well, including, for instance, the side effects of a particular drug.

Peer-reviewed medical journals earlier engaged in a similar debate and most now require that study authors disclose funding sources.