Attribute Substitution and Public Health

Partly in response to a series of posts in the New England Journal of Medicine dealing with conflicts of interest in medical research, Austin Frakt wrote a piece for the New York Times titled, “A New Way to Think About Conflicts of Interest in Medicine.”  In the end, he claims that too many critics dismiss a study simply because it received industry funding, and he says this is a kind of attribute substitution (this is a fallacy whereby something may be rejected because it is associated with something negative, rather than on its own merits).

This is a bit of red herring, because attribute substitution is not always such a bad thing. If I am negotiating to buy a new car, it may be that everything checks out regarding the engine, interior, paint, brakes, and so on, but I may reject the car simply because I happen to know it is stolen. The fact that it is stolen doesn’t make it a bad car, but it does make it spectroscopeone I would not want to buy. In the same way, the fact that a study is industry funded does not prove it is a bad study, but it is possible for a reasonable person to object to it simply on the grounds that its funding encourages unethical behavior.

Also in his essay, Frakt mentions that research is often tainted by many things that are not industry funding: things like personal relationships, religious bias, and overweening personal ambition. On the other hand, industry-funded research often yields excellent, well-controlled studies with beneficial results.

All this is true, of course, and there may be critics out there who believe that no industry-funded research should be published, but I think that is an unusual view. What is more common is to call for disclosure of financial ties to industry. With such disclosure, readers can evaluate the data with an understanding of the possible bias of researchers. More importantly, in my opinion, is that disclosure helps us see whether anyone from outside of industry is working on the same problem.

Disclosure does nothing to eliminate bias. If I know that someone is working for Pharma Co. X, I know she is trying to develop profitable products for her employer. The best path to a high profit is probably through rigorously controlled research. The bias of the researcher is to develop a profitable product, and disclosure will not change that bias; it isn’t a conflict of interest as profit is really the only interest driving the research.

The problem is that most research is now funded by industry (in 2012, industry funded about 59 percent of medical research in the US).  When researchers are hired to create marketable products they are, indeed, motivated to show bias both in how they conduct their research and in what kind of research they begin in the first place. Unethical practices can happen both within and without industry, but we are better to have a variety of ways to fund research, and we are better to have transparency about how research is funded and how it is conducted. We need to know how research participants were recruited. We need to know what data was and was not used. On the issue of transparency, I agree completely with Frakt: “To the extent research design and methods are not up to snuff, that’s the red flag — the door through which conflicts of interest enter and exert undue influence. More rigorous, transparent and reliable research from both industry and nonindustry sources would reduce the need to lean so heavily on mental shortcuts like attribute substitution in judging scientific merit.”

Finally, we need to know whether research was aimed at reducing human suffering or merely at generating profits. On a good day, these two goals are perfectly aligned. On a normal day, reducing human suffering is at odds with creating products. I’ve mentioned before philosopher Thomas Pogge’s efforts to create incentives for companies to develop drugs for conditions that may not be profitable, and I think it is worth mentioning his Health Impact Fund once again. Pogge’s solution is one that works fairly well with market-based thinking. Love it or hate it, it is a good effort. Other solutions are possible, though. Governments could pool resources to simply set up labs and hire scientists to develop cures for diseases that affect global health. Capitalist investors might also want to develop cures in order to capitalize on improved human resources as John Rockefeller did about a hundred years ago.

Yes, I realize government funding and charitable institutes still exist (Rockefeller’s legacy continues), but research for profit (and only for profit) threatens our ability to continue advances in public health. We need greater transparency (of financial ties and data transparency) in research, greater protection for research subjects, more variety in funding sources, and more checks to replicate and confirm findings. It may be expensive, but mistakes are expensive, too.

2 thoughts on “Attribute Substitution and Public Health

  1. John H Noble Jr 04/09/2015 / 3:11 am

    Replication is at the core of empirical science. One can replicate to check the accuracy of scientific claims. If the source of a claim–industry or non-industry–refuses to provide access to the data in support of the claim, it is not “attribute substitution” to reject the claim on the basis of a rebuttable presumption of biased reporting or even fraud. The New England Journal of Medicine is defending commercialized medicine that is riddled with conflicts of interest. Will we soon hear appeals to First Amendment commercial free speech as grounds for accepting manuscripts for publication?

  2. ethicsbeyondcompliance 04/09/2015 / 4:14 pm

    Or will the same industry conduct the drug trials and publish the journals?

    Thanks for the comment.

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