A PROMINENT case of scientific fraud is being seized on by critics of the pharmaceutical industry to highlight their calls for a crackdown on the use of scientific studies for marketing purposes.
Starting in 1996, Scott Reuben of the Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, published a series of trials testing whether painkillers, including Pfizer’s Celebrex and Merck’s Vioxx, relieve post-operative pain. Now 21 of Reuben’s papers have been shown to contain fabricated data, after he was investigated by Baystate officials. Many have already been retracted.
Reuben’s studies were part of an array of small clinical trials funded by Pfizer and Merck after Celebrex and Vioxx…
