It may be the worst-kept secret in medicine: pharmaceutical money buys journal influence. What the public has so long suspected has now been demonstrated in a recently published peer-reviewed study. (1) Researchers from Wake Forest University School of Medicine and the University of Florida found that ‘in major medical journals, more pharmaceutical advertising is associated with publishing fewer articles about dietary supplements.’ Furthermore, they found that more pharmaceutical company advertising resulted in the journal having more articles with ‘negative conclusions about dietary supplement safety.’ This new study, the first of its kind, specifically looked at pharmaceutical advertising as compared with journal text about dietary supplements. The authors reviewed a year’s worth of issues from each of eleven of the largest medical journals: the Journal of the American Medical Association, New England Journal of Medicine, British Medical Journal, Canadian Medical Association Journal, Annals of Internal Medicine, Archives of Internal Medicine, Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, Pediatrics and Pediatric Research, and American Family Physician. The results were statistically significant. . . and embarrassing. Medical journals carrying the most pharmaceutical ads ‘published significantly fewer major articles about dietary supplements per issue than journals with the fewest pharmads (P < 0.01). [...]