Medical Fiction: A Surprise Genre to Those Who Are Harmed or Made Unalive
April 17, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold. I find it interesting that AI detectors identify my writing style as AI output. I suppose I should be flattered, but I just don’t care.
I love the grant rat race. For those who are unfamiliar with the life of the academic, an alternative NASCAR series exists. Unlike the race car drivers, the professionals guiding their research race cars do not wear badges, sport plastic signage on their facilities, or do commercials for worthwhile enterprises like Curtis Turner who pitched Plymouth automobiles in 1955.
The grant racers operate at what is presented as a higher level of professionalism. Ignore the behind-the-scenes equipment providers and other facilitators. A single breakthrough from a research grant can move some expensive hardware. Surprise!
A researcher in the 1850s explains that whiskey cocktails can cure cholera. Will the esteemed publishing house accept the article for its respected medical journal? Thanks, Venice.ai. Good enough.
The winner of a grant race wins as well. Maybe a private lab needs a new director? Maybe a big equipment maker wants a luminary to give a talk at a trade show, show up in a booth, and go to dinner with some potential customers? Maybe a big win will allow a super modern approach to ameliorating the downsides of some off-the-wall disease?
What’s not to like? Fame? Money? Interesting jaunts to off sites? Adulation from peers who envy the research race winner?
That’s why I found “A Medical Journal Says the Case Reports It Has Published for 25 Years Are, in Fact, Fiction” fun reading. I wondered if ethical behavior had found its way into the grant race, the annals of non-reproducible research, and normative research behavior. (Note: I will be focusing on medical information, but I want to point out that the same race plan works for that exciting field of artificial intelligence research and other disciplines too.)
The write up reports:
A Canadian journal has issued corrections on 138 case reports it published over the last 25 years to add a disclaimer: The cases described are fictional…. The corrections come following a January article in New Yorker magazine that mentioned one of the reports — “Baby boy blue,” a case published in 2010 describing an infant who showed signs of opioid exposure via breast milk while his mother was taking acetaminophen with codeine. The New Yorker article made public an admission by one of the coauthors that the case was made up.
No AI fudging needed. The estimable research team just fabricated data.
Here’s a politically correct statement:
“Readers of primary source peer reviewed medical scientific journals have an absolute right to believe that the article being read is as accurate as possible, original, and factual, unless clearly specified otherwise,” said former JAMA editor George Lundberg. “‘Alternative facts,’ as popularized by Kellyanne Conway, have no place in a medical or scientific journal.”
Imagine. An expert is suggesting that made up medical information should not be presented as actual factual. But here’s the interesting part. One of the allegedly Mark Twain inspired essays is quoted as saying:
One author of a case report was surprised to learn of the correction — because the case described in her article is true.
Yep, I am sure the truth or fiction is in the literature … somewhere.
The essay concludes:
Regardless of the statements in the author guidelines, the fact the cases are fictional should have been conveyed to the readers of all of these articles, Juurlink [David Juurlink, professor of medicine and pediatrics at the University of Toronto] said. In the case of Baby boy blue, “the article was structured as an authentic clinical case, indexed as such, and cited as an actual clinical observation. Readers had no way of knowing it was fictional,” he said. “A narrative that is fictional but published in the format of a genuine case report, without disclosure at the time of publication, is functionally indistinguishable from fabrication in the scientific record.”
Several observations strike me as warranted:
- The fakery has persisted for 25 years. How’s that for evidence of citation verification by graduate students, wanna-be professors, and big time research outfits?
- Fake medical information can harm people. Fake kid-related medical information could nuke your child.
- Publishers and editors need money. If it sells subscriptions or gets clicks, go with it. Accuracy? Sure, let’s have lunch.
Net net: I found the write up amusing. Reality is exactly what I see and experience every day. A new amusement park: Ethicsland.
Stephen E Arnold, April 17, 2026
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