Mark Simon’s commentary on Dr. Fuhrman’s misdeeds is excellent. There’s not much else to say, except perhaps to remind ourselves that the proposition of using a whole food, plant-based diet, with little or no added oil, sugar and salt, is an amazingly productive story that has so much to offer.
I must add, however, one additional comment to my own post on Dr. Fuhrman. This concerns my ‘take’ on the matter of trust in science, especially as it applies to the publication of research results in professional peer-reviewed journals. It is a process that is poorly understood by most people.
When manuscripts are submitted for publication, reviewers of the manuscripts rarely if ever see the raw data. They only see the summaries of these raw data. Thus they are compelled to trust the authors who compile the data into tables and graphs. If any of these raw data are not included, this must be explained. This process is a matter of trust that is so fundamental to science. If and when this trust is broken, penalties can be severe. At least this is the way that science is supposed to work and I am confident that it does for the vast majority of researchers who publish papers. Our reputations in science rest on this trust and without it, our reputations--and our careers--can be quickly destroyed.
I accepted Dr. Fuhrman’s request to help him publish a peer-reviewed paper by lending my name as a secondary author. I did so because I believed his claim that he had something important to say. In effect, he wanted to use my reputation because of my half-century of publishing about 350 papers, my serving on the editorial review boards of five journals and my serving on several grant review panels of NIH, the American Society and other organizations.
Fuhrman’s manuscript really was not a study. It was a summary of case histories from his practice. As project director his name was listed last, as is customary. Dr. Sarter was the person who tabulated the data. Her name was listed first, as is customary. They are the authors who assembled the data, wrote the manuscript and submitted the paper. My name was in the middle, as is customary for people who have a secondary part in the project.
The paper was submitted to two respectable journals. Both rejected the manuscript. About two years later, I inquired of Dr. Fuhrman what had become of the manuscript and he informed me that it was being published in a journal with a much lesser reputation (May 2008).
Three years later (2011) I learned that the findings of this paper were being questioned. I was urged to get a copy of the raw data to see for myself. Initially, Dr. Sarter who I have never met, denied giving me a copy. My second request succeeded, thus giving me my first opportunity to see her compilation of the data, in the form of an Excel sheet. I did my own compilation and it was flawed, as initially suspected by the person who brought this to my attention. But, importantly, this is only Dr. Sarter’s and Dr. Fuhrman’s compilation of the data. To this day, I have never seen the real raw data as presented in the case histories.
I also learned (in 2011) that my name, three years earlier (2008), had been changed to my being listed first in the journal’s archives. This is a serious misrepresentation, although I do not know who did this and why it was done. In any event, it incorrectly gave the impression to others that I was main author of this so-called study.
Like I have done hundreds of times for reviews of other manuscripts, I had trusted Drs. Fuhrman and Sarter to honestly summarize the data--a huge mistake on my part, as it turned out.
But, unbelievably, this flawed summary of data was only the beginning of the problem. Dr. Fuhrman then grossly exaggerated these flawed findings even further, in very public places.
I therefore had to withdraw my name by submitting to the journal a proposed retraction letter. I shared a copy of my letter with Dr. Fuhrman, assuming that he would want to do the same, as is customary in matters of this sort. He failed to take advantage of this opportunity and continued to go forward with the same exaggerations. Indeed, he began using this study, with my name intact, to raise public funding for his version of research.
He made it clear to me that he had no intention of acknowledging his culpability or of changing course in making false public claims. Instead, he and one of this colleagues began accusing me of “personal attack”, among other charges. Finally, about six months later my retraction letter was published but only after the editor eliminated the substance of my reason for submitting the letter.
Aside from Fuhrman’s serious misrepresentations, this affair reveals how important is this matter of trust in science. It is literally impossible for reviewers and secondary authors of studies to examine the details of raw data. They must trust those who assemble these data in a form that can be properly reviewed, analyzed and interpreted. When that trust is broken, science fails, and severe penalties can be the consequence. In this case, based on what I have experienced, I can no longer trust anything that Dr. Fuhrman does or says, as I said in my previous post. Were he to have been a member of a professional society, I am confident that he would by now have been put out to pasture.
And finally, returning to my initial point, although we must clean up messes when they occur, we also must not lose sight of the extraordinary possibilities that this dietary lifestyle offers for solving so many of our problems. We also must acknowledge the exceptional work and courage shown by the majority--and growing number--of professionals working in this area for these past 2-3 decades.
