Peer review: Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre: "In Bad Pharma he repeats this trick, but the headline news is infinitely more disturbing: contemporary medicine is acutely sick and in desperate need of therapy. Usually, it’s naturopaths who run this argument, portraying what they see as contemporary medicine’s de-humanising reductionism.
Goldacre’s perspective is very different: medicine’s evidence base has been undermined by an unscrupulous alliance of the pharmaceutical industry and regulators, which leads to the routine suppression of negative studies revealing many drugs to be either ineffective or less effective than those they seek to replace.
This suppression has been wilful and many academics (the industry’s “key opinion leaders”) have acted as willing partners in the enterprise, putting their names to ghostwritten articles reporting positive trials, while failing to publish negative trials.
Since there’s so much missing data, we can’t really say whether the therapies we use work or not. "
'via Blog this'
