It's time for our weekly edition of Investigative Roundup, pulling some of the best investigative and watchdog content from around the internet so you can rest assured you're in the know when it comes to questionable medical affairs.
Vitamin D Devotee Doc's Dubious Money
Over the last 7 years, the vitamin D fad has become big business for companies selling supplements -- $936 million in sales in 2017 -- and lab testing for vitamin D for Medicare patients was up 547% since 2007 in 2016.
Now, an investigation by Kaiser Health News found that one of biggest players for "sunshine in a bottle," Michael Holick, MD, has extensive monetary ties to businesses that benefit from his promotion of the hormone, "including drugmakers, the indoor-tanning industry and one of the country's largest commercial labs."
Ever since his 2011 report in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism that concluded most people lack sufficient vitamin D, Holick's national platform as a de facto spokesperson for vitamin D has bolstered the bottom line for many companies and, apparently, lined his pockets. Holick currently receives $1,000 a month from Quest Diagnostics -- since his report, vitamin D lab tests have become a substantial cost for Medicare. Over a 5-year period, Holick also received some $163,000 from drug companies with a stake in vitamin D's success. He's also received $150,000 from the tanning salon industry. Meanwhile, more studies show that vitamin D might not be the miracle pill Holick purports it to be.
Dartmouth Plagiarism Scandal
Retraction Watch 's Allison McCook, working with STAT News, reports that a very prominent and visible health policy scholar H. Gilbert Welch, MD, was found to have via an investigation by Dartmouth College.
In May 2015, Welch asked his Dartmouth colleague Samir Soneji for a slide Welch saw at a workshop. Soneji asked that he be included as a co-author on any paper that involved the research.
Welch and several colleagues published the NEJM paper "Breast-Cancer Tumor Size, Overdiagnosis, and Mammography Screening Effectiveness" in 2016 without including Soneji as author or otherwise acknowledging his contribution. Soneji and another researcher then complained to Dartmouth's provost of research.
In a June 14 letter to Soneji, interim provost David Kotz stated that an investigative committee found Welch "engaged in research misconduct, namely, plagiarism."
VA's Money Pit
In July a ribbon cutting ceremony marked the opening of a brand-new, "gleaming," 31-acre Veterans Affairs medical center in Denver, . It also marked 14 years of attempting to keep it on budget -- which utterly failed, costing $1 billion more than planned.
To make matters worse, this sprawling, 12-building complex -- which includes features like a therapy pool, private rooms, and sliding doors -- doesn't yet include a PTSD ward. For that, vets will have to go to the old facility. Officials say they're building one in the new space, but it will take almost a year and a half.
The VA's inspector general noted in a report that "escalating costs and schedule slippages are primarily the result of poor business decisions, inexperience with the type of contract used, and mismanagement by VA senior leaders."
The High Price of Bullying
Allegations of bullying in Wellcome Trust funding, which recently adopted a zero-tolerance policy on workplace bullying.
Nazneen Rahman allegedly bullied scientists and staff at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in London. She resigned after ICR commissioned an independent investigation of the accusations.
The ICR has not released the findings of the investigation publicly due to "highly personal information," and since Rahman resigned, there was no disciplinary hearing. They did, however, give enough information to Wellcome for them to make their decision to take away funding.