Ben “Bad Science” Goldacre’s new book Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients ships today, and Ben has posted the foreword, including this helpful paragraph, which explains the book’s entire thesis in one handy blob:
Drugs 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. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. 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. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in its life, and even then they don’t give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion. In their forty years of practice after leaving medical school, doctors hear about what works through ad hoc oral traditions, from sales reps, colleagues or journals. But those colleagues can be in the pay of drug companies – often undisclosed – and the journals are too. And so are the patient groups. And finally, academic papers, which everyone thinks of as objective, are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the companies, without disclosure. Sometimes whole academic journals are even owned outright by one drug company. Aside from all this, for several of the most important and enduring problems in medicine, we have no idea what the best treatment is, because it’s not in anyone’s financial interest to conduct any trials at all. These are ongoing problems, and although people have claimed to fix many of them, for the most part, they have failed; so all these problems persist, but worse than ever, because now people can pretend that everything is fine after all.
Ben’s got a real knack for combining rigor and readability. He’s one of the few people who can use a phrase like “I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that” without sounding like a smug jerk. If you want to get a sense of how the book unfolds, you can check out the excerpt the Guardian published earlier this week.
Here’s the foreword to my new book. [BadScience.net]
Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients [Amazon UK]