The Secret Raven

The ‘secret raven’ is a term littered throughout Franz Kafka’s letters to his Milena, his last love, before he died in 1922. The secret raven represents the fears and obsessions that stalked him throughout his life.

It is the title of this blog because the raven is what many health journalists are using against us – our own fears of cancer and pandemics, sickness and death – in order to sell their newspapers.

I am a journalist working for a well-known pharmaceutical trade magazine and I come across misinformation from health journalists and, more scarily, the pharma industry on a daily basis.

Given the nature of my publication, I cannot always publish the full truth and, even if I could, it would be read predominately by pharma – an industry that has no wish to read about its own shortcomings.

This is why I would send off the more interesting – and downright scandalous stories to blogger whistleblowers. The last time I did this was with Dr Ben Goldacre who, although happy to take on the story, suggested I was better placed to write up the individual occurrences of bad pharma and bad health journalists.

So here it is, a blog about bag health journalists and bad pharma from an insider.