At the Oct 23 town hall meeting, the administration of Down East Community Hospital gave everyone a first-hand demonstration of sham peer review.
Its prime hallmark is that the accused is presumed guilty from the outset: the haughty administrators do not even listen to the defense. But just in case there might be a defense, they load on a laundry list of irrelevancies at the last minute.
Hospital administrators had no interest in what the community thinks. They didn’t show up, sending instead an echocardiography technician, armed with an appropriately yellow indictment sheet, reminiscent of yellow journalism.
Nothing on the sheet has to do with the hospital’s treatment of physicians. It is purely an ad hominem attack on the association of which Dr. Lawrence Huntoon is past president, and the journal of which he is editor-in-chief.
Hearsay is good enough for sham peer review; in fact, that’s what it’s all about. Same for the yellow sheet. Somebody who wrote something in the New York Times said something derogatory about AAPS—in 1966. Guilty! And in Time magazine in 1967. Guilty! Somebody with a microphone on National Public Radio said AAPS was an advocacy group. Guilty! An article in the journal, which cited 98 references, called attention to the danger of importing infectious diseases by not screening immigrants—and several sources seized on one debatable figure, the least important one. Guilty! The editor-in-chief of Chemical and Engineering News, who after all studied medicine for one year, passes judgment on everything in the AAPS journal. He, by the way, was trying to smear a single article, with which a lot of, perhaps the majority of members of the American Chemical Society happen to agree. Guilty!
Distorting the “evidence” is also a favorite tactic of sham peer review. Like all medical and scientific journals, the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons states that the opinions expressed by authors of articles do not necessarily represent the views of the journal or the organization that publishes it. But the hospital demands that its editor defend every statement in it, before they listen to his case on sham peer review. Then it misrepresents the issues.
The “journal” doesn’t “claim” that “abortion can cause breast cancer.” It did publish several articles citing evidence that abortion is a risk factor. A number of prestigious organizations deny any potential link. Are they covering something up? Read the articles, and decide for yourself.
The “journal” doesn’t “claim” that “HIV does not cause AIDS.” It published a couple of articles that point to difficulties in the presumed causal association. Established hypotheses have been wrong before. We learn and advance by questioning them. Read the articles, and decide for yourself.
The “journal” doesn’t “claim” that illegal immigrants are causing an increase in leprosy. An author of one article, in 2005, cited references that show a significant increase in the number of cases. The author of the yellow sheet claims he has statistics that differ, but gives no specific citations. But is this a war of references between the late Madeleine Pelner Cosman, Ph.D., and the echocardiography technician who claims authorship of the yellow sheet? Or is the discussion supposed to be about a hospital driving doctors out of your community?
Can the hospital undertake to ruin a physician’s career if an echocardiography technician finds something to criticize in a huge pile of records dating back to 1966?
Who would want to work in such a hospital? Dr. Orient is executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and managing editor of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
