Amid Growing Evidence of Conflicts of Interest and Obdurate Groupthink in Medical Journals, Researchers Must Entertain Contrarian Ideas

Mainstream medicine, like other academic fields, is shaped by prevailing paradigms and the dominant narratives they create. Over the past half-century, these paradigms have increasingly reflected the growing commercial influence of the pharmaceutical industry. Dominant narratives are closely tied to groupthink, to which medical journals are often subject. In addition, more 'prestigious' medical journals tend to have further financial conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry. These dynamics limit scientific progress by suppressing awareness of the iatrogenic aspects of industry products and the benefits of alternative non-patentable and unpatentable medical products and therapeutic interventions... 

Editorial

... Internal pharmaceutical industry documents released in litigation from criminal trials, where the industry has been fined $122 billion since 2000, have revealed companies invest in shaping narratives to dominate a particular medical field in favor of their products, understating harms and overstating benefits. Conflicts of interest now bedevil every level of pharmaceutical/medical science. Beginning with the obvious, pharmaceutical companies tend to oversee the trials for their own products. Less obvious but more concerning, the large pharmaceutical companies provide the majority of funding to the regulators tasked with considering the evidence of clinical trials and granting or denying licensure... 

A remedy to errors of groupthink is to uphold the right of dissenters to be heard. Ideally, medical journals would actively encourage the discussion of contrarian ideas, perhaps with dedicated sections to such or by seeking responses from researchers with differing views. Unfortunately, groupthink in scientific peer review has been established as a bias factor, with the risk that editors and peer reviewers act as unscientific 'mindguards.' 'Censorship and silencing practices' in the scientific literature and online discourse, amounting to groupthink mindguarding activity, during the COVID era have been surveyed, noting 'deleterious consequences' to clinicians and researchers who questioned the prevailing orthodoxy and consequent damage to the public’s trust in medical science...

Something is rotten in the Academy. We need to improve. One way to improve is to properly address financial and other conflicts of interest. Another way is to entertain contrarian ideas, to indulge those occupied with 'taboo science,' while still adhering to time-tested scientific principles and methods."