6/23/2023 0 Comments Bad pharmaThis distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in a drug’s life, and even then they don’t give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. When trials throw up results that companies don’t like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug’s true effects. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. With all of the trillions of dollars spent on drug development and drugs themselves, have you ever wondered why people don’t seem to feel better than they did back in the 1970s? There have been so many new painkillers, for example, but none seem to work much better than aspirin, a remedy known to Hippocrates ( Wikipedia).ĭrugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. I’ve finished Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients ,a well-researched effort presented in overheated language by Ben Goldacre.
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