Merck Makes Phony Peer-Review Journal

An interesting take on the Merk Maneno:

It’s a safe guess that somewhere at Merck today someone is going through the meeting minutes of the day that the hair-brained scheme for the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine was launched, and that everyone who was in the room is now going to be fired.

from the bioethics blog

Comments

#1 Sigmund
May 4, 2009

A bit off topic Greg but I seem to recall you posted a piece on this controversy in the past. A new paper has just come out in Science giving more evidence of the survival of dinosaur protein in fossils – this time in an 80 million year old hadrosaur specimen.
Science 324, 626 (2009);
Mary H. Schweitzer, et al.
Sequences of the Campanian Hadrosaur B.canadensis
Biomolecular Characterization and Protein
#2 Greg Laden
May 4, 2009

Interesting. I’ll have to look into that.
#3 DuWayne
May 4, 2009

You know, I may just have to start blogging about cam more. And this is probably a really good place to fucking start.

I have gotten into probably seventeen or eighteen discussions in the last couple years about vaccines, wherein I actually used much of what I’ve learned from various sciencebloggers (Orac being top of the list). I have gotten into a lot of arguments with people, regarding the magical properties of homeopathy. I got into a discussion that stretched over about three or four times I saw a gent in the coffee shop in Portland, about his overuse of St. John’s Wart – he was having serious issues with it and was convinced that he just wasn’t taking enough.

I have fallen into a lot of magical bullshit thinking over the years. I like to call it pathological credulity, something that I work hard to compensate for. And I am all about fighting magical bullshit thinking, especially when it comes to medicine – because it’s important, especially when we’re talking about vaccines.

These disgusting excuses for “doctors” should be stripped of their licenses and exposed for the fucking charlatans they are. These are the assholes that make it so very easy for people to fall in with magical thinking masquerading as medicine. Because it’s pretty damned obvious that a fairly large segment of the pharmaceutical industry is corrupt and our oversight is broken.

And people wonder why it’s so easy for the cam charlatans to convince others they have something in their magical water and cleansing routines. Assholes like the one’s who lent credibility to this “journal” get people started down that path, before they ever run into the cam charlatans…