Doctor Scott Reubin: Reprise

I bet you thought he'd faded from my memory -- me and my mind like a steel trap. Wrong! There is just a dearth of information out there, which means, I fear, nothing good.

It is odd to me that only non-medical people seem to be urging the precise and intense application of criminal charges on the hide of Dr. Scott Reuben, fraud extraordinaire.

Tufts, where do they stand? Patients, colleagues? Those innocent "co-authors"? The, cough, innocent, gag, drug companies? The FDA?

Who really believes that he did all the work of conducting fake clinical trials and the resultant fake articles and fake peer reviews and all the other fakiness... without help?

We cannot afford to let this case fade from attention.

To refresh the particulars of the case, here is an excellent take on the crime, found over at e-patients.net, "Dr. Reuben deeply regrets that this happened."

"Dr. Reuben deeply regrets that this happened." Isn't that a riot? Isn't that the most insulting response imaginable?

Back on March 23, Gilles Frydman put together a post on what he tongue-firmly-in-cheek called
"the third... in the unfortunate series about conflicts of interest":

In truth the quote is from one of his attorneys. Dr. Reuben, a world-famous anesthesiologist and former chief of acute pain management at Baystate Medical
Center, Springfield, Mass, one of the campuses of Tufts University School of Medicine is accused to have fabricated over 13 years at least 21 medical studies
(and perhaps many more among the 72 papers written by the good doctor) that
claimed to show benefits from painkillers like Vioxx and Celebrex, 2 drugs since
withdrawn from the U.S. and worldwide market due to safety concerns of an
increased risk of cardiovascular events (including heart attack and stroke).
Most, if not all, of these articles are in the process to be retracted. The
wonderful Dr. Reuben also wrote to the Food and Drug Administration, urging the
agency not to restrict the use of many of the painkillers he studied, citing his
own fabricated data to prove their safety and effectiveness....

Even better Dr. Reuben published fabricated studies showing the great effectiveness
of a combination treatment using 2 drugs from Pfizer, Celebrex and Lyrica. No
one paid attention to the fact that, like Dr Robinson and Dr. Ridker et al. Dr.
Ruben was regularly paid by pharmaceutical companies. In fact he was active as a
member of Pfizer speakers bureau until recently and received, from 2002 to 2007,
5 research grants from that company. Besides the evident culture of greed that
has infected a lot of the medical research activities, there must be something
even deeper that can convince doctors that it is OK to put many lives at risk by
falsifying results.

Flummoxed? Wait, there is more! Dr. Reuben’s attorney also said there were extenuating circumstances! I kid you not. As usualno one is really talking. Dr. Reuben is on extended medical leave. Tufts University doesn’t seem to know him anymore. I guess everybody is trying to get the story to disappear under some heavy duty carpet. But this story cannot disappear....

The fraud didn’t stop at the published articles but was also used in
multiple letters in response to valid scientific articles to destroy the
scientific findings of honest researchers....

The clinical impact of the fraud will be profound. Jacques Chelly, MD, PhD,
MBA, director of the Division of Regional Anesthesia and Acute Interventional
Perioperative Pain at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), said
that the fraud has left multimodal analgesia “in shambles”. He added

“the big chunk of what people have based their protocol on is gone.
we have stopped giving celecoxib and pregabalin to surgery patients until we
have some very formal evidence that we should do something else. In this day and
age, doing multimodal [therapy] is expensive. Any institution is going to look
at evidence-based clinical decisions, and unless we have very strong data, it is
a problem. Since most of evidence is now unreliable you really don’t have any
evidence that the combination is working...."