Should Medical Journals Inform Readers if a Book Reviewer can’t be Objective?
At the end of last week’s post I suggested that book reviewer Donald Abrams and the New England Journal of Medicine had withheld information useful for evaluating Abrams’ review: that he is the Secretary/Treasurer of the Society for Integrative Oncology (SIO), the organization of which Lorenzo Cohen, the first editor of the book that Abrams reviewed,* is President. I also promised to look at material from the book and from the Society’s website in order to discover “data that will allow even the most conventional oncologists to appreciate [the value of ‘integrative’ methods].” There is little question that Abrams and Cohen know each other, or at least that Abrams couldn’t have been expected to write an entirely objective review of Cohen’s book. Abrams is the Program Chair for the Society’s upcoming 5th International Conference, sponsored by the American Cancer Society. He and Cohen will be sharing the stage for the “Intro/Welcome.” Does it matter that most NEJM readers wouldn’t have le
