HARLOT plc: an amalgamation of the world's two oldest professions

Tired of being good but poor, the authors have amalgamated the world's two oldest professions in a new niche company, HARLOT plc, specialising in How to Achieve positive Results without actually Lying to Overcome the Truth We've been good.DLS has prohibited sponsors' stockholders, much less employees, from seats on his data safety and monitoring boards and has enforced the banning of pharmaceutical reps from the medical wards at McMaster University.ADO has exposed problems with experts and has promulgated rigorous reviews of research to inform decisions about health care.In sum, we have established impeccable reputations for protecting the validity of randomised trials and systematic reviews, and for exposing lapses in methods, validity, therapeutic claims, and professional conduct.We've also been poor.DLS drives a clapped out pick-up truck, and his rowing boat leaks.ADO wears worn out blue jeans and hasn't had a new pair of shoes for 10 years.It has finally dawned on us that being good and being poor are causally related: being good doesn't pay.Accordingly, we have decided that it's time for us to find out whether being bad pays better.We're combining the world's oldest and second oldest professions, cashing in on our reputations, and distributing this confidential prospectus for our new company, HARLOT plc. Defining medicineMedicine is politics "Politics is nothing more than medicine on a grand scale." Rudolf Virchow, 1848 1Politics is money "[Politics is] the conduct of public affairs for private advantage."Ambrose Bierce, 1911 2Ergo, medicine is money "Pliny says, in so many words, that the cerates and cataplasms, plasters, collyria, and antidotes, so abundant in his time, as in more recent days, were mere tricks to make money."