The drugs don’t work: a modern medical scandal | Ben Goldacre (The Guardian)
►http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/21/drugs-industry-scandal-ben-goldacre
The doctors prescribing the drugs don’t know they don’t do what they’re meant to. Nor do their patients. The manufacturers know full well, but they’re not telling. (...) Source: The Guardian
The drugs don’t work: a modern medical scandal, par Ben Goldacre (The Guardian)
►http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/21/drugs-industry-scandal-ben-goldacre
In 2010, researchers from Harvard and Toronto found all the trials looking at five major classes of drug – antidepressants, ulcer drugs and so on – then measured two key features: were they positive, and were they funded by industry? They found more than 500 trials in total: 85% of the industry-funded studies were positive, but only 50% of the government-funded trials were. In 2007, researchers looked at every published trial that set out to explore the benefits of a statin. These cholesterol-lowering drugs reduce your risk of having a heart attack and are prescribed in very large quantities. This study found 192 trials in total, either comparing one statin against another, or comparing a statin against a different kind of treatment. They found that industry-funded trials were 20 times more likely to give results favouring the test drug.
These are frightening results, but they come from individual studies. So let’s consider systematic reviews into this area. In 2003, two were published. They took all the studies ever published that looked at whether industry funding is associated with pro-industry results, and both found that industry-funded trials were, overall, about four times more likely to report positive results. A further review in 2007 looked at the new studies in the intervening four years: it found 20 more pieces of work, and all but two showed that industry-sponsored trials were more likely to report flattering results.
The drugs don’t work: a modern medical scandal
►http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/21/drugs-industry-scandal-ben-goldacre
The doctors prescribing the drugs don’t know they don’t do what they’re meant to. Nor do their patients. The manufacturers know full well, but they’re not telling.
