What These Medical Journals Don’t Reveal: Top Doctors’ Ties to Industry by Charles Ornstein and Katie Thomas is an article made with the collaborative efforts of the New York times and Propublica.  As the title of this article suggests, this article surrounds the failures of these medical journals with regards to disclosing the ties between top doctors and the industry. This article focuses specifically on the dozens of leading medical figures that have failed to adequately disclose their financial relationship to the pharmaceutical and health care industry in recent years. This issue is complex because the interdependent relationship between the researcher and the publisher is important in the success of the study and the paper. This means that the paper, the researchers and the industry would seem to benefit from producing positive results. What seems to be more alarming is that the reporting system seems to have many of the same flaws that were identified nearly a decade ago. A study found that of the 100 doctors most compensated by device makers, only 37 disclosed conflicts in articles surrounding them. Dr. Mehraneh Dorna Jafari says that, “The journals aren’t checking and the rules are different for every single thing.” This not only indicates a malpractice but also the inconsistency of said malpractice. The need for this transparency stems from concerns that researchers tied to the industry will skew their results in order to favor the company they are doing business with. Medical journals editors claim that they are trying to standardize disclosure. The opposition think that because of the credibility of these top researchers these changes would be “costly and unnecessary”.

In regards to research ethics this article relates more towards the credibility side. This article doesn’t go into anything malicious that has been done with this practice. The opposition is correct in saying that implementing this new process would be costly but they are wrong in saying that it is unnecessary. The importance of credibility in journalism, especially medical journalism, is immense and its outrageous that medical journalism has the same problems it had nearly a decade ago. The fact that something as important as improving the already abysmal trust between the industry and the public isn’t a priority is frighteningly sketchy. This problem wouldn’t be as great if it was just regular journalism but the fact that medical information is being skewed in this way is just dangerous. I hope that in the future the relationship between researchers and medical industries is disclosed.