Or JAMA juice, as the case may be. Seems like the AMA has upset a nonprofit organization, and the allegations are serious. I mean, you have to have some ethics if you are publishing a medical journal that you would like the professional world to consider prestigious.

From the Wall Street Journal:

A nonprofit group that monitors industry links to medical research called for the suspension of the top two editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association, and an investigation into allegations that they threatened a researcher who criticized a study published in the journal.

The Alliance for Human Research Protection, which is often critical of industry-academic ties, made the requests in a letter it sent Wednesday to the AMA and the journal, known as JAMA.

This has been a topic of conversation on some health/journalism list servs, but I see that it now made it to prime time. In a nutshell, a doctor named Jonathan Leo wrote a letter to the British Medical Journal, in which he criticized how results were reported in a JAMA study last year.  He also said that  JAMA didn’t report the study’s author had a financial relationship with the manufacturer of the drug in the study.

The publication of the BMJ letter upset JAMA’s editor in chief, Catherine DeAngelis, who acknowledges contacting Dr. Leo’s dean in an effort to get Dr. Leo to retract the letter. Dr. Leo says JAMA’s executive deputy editor, Phil Fontanarosa, also called him to request a retraction. Dr. Leo has said Dr. Fontanarosa told him, “You are banned from JAMA for life. You will be sorry.” Dr. Fontanarosa, through a spokeswoman, has said Dr. Leo’s version of the conversation is “inaccurate.”

Nothing like docs duking it out, but this does raise serious ethical questions. Was the study that JAMA published flawed enough that it should have undergone a better review? Should they be more efficient at making sure authors report conflicts of interest? And should someone be banned simply for criticism? Is that a Soviet mentality or what? Maybe they should send Dr. Leo to the physician’s Gulag…

16:08: This is an update to my original post. A link to the Economist, which has a nice article (well, not nice for JAMA) about this scenario. It sounds like JAMA is more interested in preserving its “reputation” at the cost of burying serious infractions, and this is only going to boomerany in its face. The AMA is already rapidly losing membership, and it may be that JAMA’s readership will be waning as well–this type of behavior is quite detrimental and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the outcome is that it deters researchers from publishing in JAMA.