Read this op-ed piece from the Times by the author of “Bad Pharma…”
(Ben has an interesting website: http://www.badscience.net/)
How should we handle omission of information?
Is dont ask dont tell dangerous for healthcare?
some hightlights from op-ed:
“Trials with positive or flattering results, unsurprisingly, are about twice as likely to be published — and this is true for both academic research and industry studies”
“These problems would be bad enough on their own, but they are compounded by a generation of “fake fixes” that have delivered false reassurance, and so prevent realistic public discussion.”
“All of these problems are perhaps best illustrated by the case of Tamiflu, which governments have spent billions of dollars stockpiling, in the belief that the drug will reduce the rate of complications from influenza. But roughly half the trial results have never been published, and researchers trying to obtain the full Clinical Study Reports have been stonewalled by the manufacturer, Roche.”
“This cannot be acceptable. Withholding data not only misleads doctors and patients; it’s an insult to the patients who have participated in clinical trials, believing that they were helping to improve medical knowledge.”
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