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Re-activateShocking allegations have surfaced today that an anesthesiologist, Scott Reuben, at the Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass. fabricated results in at least 21 studies dating back to 1996. Our sister site, Consumerist.com, reported that Baystate Medical Center has asked for the articles to be retracted by medical journals after an internal investigation stemming from a routine audit uncovered the fraud.
Reuben's work included positive results for the painkillers, Vioxx and Bextra—both of which have since pulled from the market for safety reasons. According to Scientific American, Reuben "attempted to convince orthopedic surgeons to shift from the first generation of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) to the newer, proprietary COX2 inhibitors, such as Vioxx, Celebrex, and Pfizer's Bextra (valdecoxib)."
But now experts wonder whether there is any scientific basis for the treatments he touted. "We are left with a large hole in our understanding of this field," Steven L. Shafer, the editor-in-chief Anesthesia and Analgesia, a journal that retracted 10 of the articles told Anesthesiology News, the publication that broke the story.
"Interestingly, when you look at Scott's output over the last 15 years, he never had a negative study," an anonymous colleague told Anesthesiology News. We've reported on the problem of publication bias in favor of positive studies before, but this kind of fabrication of positive results is extremely disturbing, not just because of the alleged misconduct by the researcher, but also because the peer review process, the Baystate Medical Center, and the companies that funded him had apparently failed to detect the fraud for so long.
—Kevin McCarthy, associate editor
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