Groupthink and conflicted interests

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

https://www.cureus.com/articles/336128-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.

Journals need to adopt a more open policy to manuscripts that encompass contrarian perspectives to dominant narratives while still adhering to time-tested scientific values and methods.

Thomas Kuhn (1962)

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo13179781.html?utm_medium=email&utm_source=transaction

Scientific endeavour is subject to “paradigms” that restrict what ideas are considered valid

Scientists and the peer-reviewed literature, influenced by groupthink processes as by dispassionate rationality.

Science v “The Science”

Groupthink theories can be vociferously held and enforced with brutal censorship, e.g.

Nicolaus Copernicus (c, 1500)

Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (c, 1860)

Dismissed due to conflicts of interest.

Considered a misinformation merchant in his own time, he is now an icon of medical science, innovation, and courage.

During the past half-century, the profitability of large pharmaceutical companies has enabled them to dispense enormous financial investments into….

research, universities, medical education, medical journals, political parties, drug regulators, medical colleges and associations, and supranational institutions such as the World Health Organization.

They can create the medical groupthink consensus.

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 favour of their products,