Supplements' market is raising doubts, but what about core pharma itself?

Today's ET published a report titled "Pills, Promotion & Doubt" highlighting the growing supplements' market and doubts that are coming with it. Great! But what about the much bigger pharma market around it?

Here's something on that.

A new study found that the most prominent medical journals primarily use peer reviewers who have received, in total, over $1 billion dollars from the pharmaceutical/device industry in the last three years.

Do you realise what this means? This means that the peer reviewers, who are supposed to be reviewing the validity of research published by the pharma companies, have been taking money from pharma companies themselves. In excess of $350 Million every year. Haha.

The researchers looked at the 2022 peer reviewer list for the four top medical journals, i.e. The BMJ, JAMA, The Lancet, and The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). What they found was that more than half (58.9%) of the peer reviewers received payments from the pharmaceutical/device industry, including 54% who received general payments, and 31.8% who received research funding.

In total, industry spent $1.06 billion on these peer reviewers between 2020 and 2022, the majority of which was research funding ($1 billion), along with $64.18 million considered general payments.

This is like product sellers on Amazon buying reviews for their products. ₹10 apiece. And then classifying that as "research spend".

What's interesting is that although conflicts of interest of journal editors and authors have always been talked about and investigated, the "traditionally opaque" nature of peer review has hindered its evaluation, until now. And that is despite its crucial role in academic publishing. "While most journals have established conflict of interest policies for authors, fewer extend these policies to peer reviewers,” the researchers write.

Considering this, when you think about the $500 Million in total funding on the OTC supplement market, what does it really amount to? It's basically nothing. But even then, you won't get to hear anything on the former, but will hear a lot of brouhaha over the latter. Why?

Well, money talks. BS walks.

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