Marcia Angell, a lecturer at Harvard University, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine and author of The Truth About Drug Companies, wrote in an e-mail that ghostwriting practices are "evidently very common" in medicine.
At this point in our political and medical culture many folks take it as a received truth from above that doctors should not be consulting with drug and device companies.
Mark Lanier, the plaintiff's lawyer, made much of Merck's allegedly deliberate economy with the truth, and played on the current public hostility towards the drug industry to win his case.