Drug Companies Conduct Fake Studies as Marketing Tools

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Pharmaceutical companies are carrying out fake, pseudo-studies on humans as a marketing devices to get doctors familiar with new drugs. In such studies, called "seeding trials," drug companies invite hundreds of doctors to take part in a research study by asking them to recruit patients to serve as subjects. The companies then pay the doctors for every subject they recruit. These "studies" look like clinical trials, but are not designed to contribute to knowledge in any way. Their purpose is solely to make doctors more familiar with the new drugs being "tested,"  and make doctors more likely to prescribe the drugs in the future. Seeding trials are conducted privately and managed by the pharmaceutical companies' marketing departments, not their research departments. The results of such trials do not appear in medical journals, but in pharmaceutical marketing documents. The drugs in such tests already have FDA approval, but the investigators may be inexperience and untrained, and patients involved in such fake studies have even died. How do these studies avoid scrutiny by ethics boards? Institutional review boards (IRBs), which determine whether human studies are ethically sound, don't pass judgement on whether a study is being carried out simply as a marketing tool or not. Some IRBs are even run as for-profit businesses, and get paid by the same pharmaceutical companies that put on the studies. If a for-profit IRB fails to approve too many studies, the entities funding such studies will just go elsewhere for reviews.