Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients

[Alive]

Very scary radio interview about drug testing - for example companies publish positive drug trial results that help them prove a new drug works, and bury the possibly many more trial results that show the drug to be ineffective. Drug companies try to keep drug trial results secret from doctors and patients - billions of dollars have been spent stockpiling Tamiflu but the trial results have never been published. Drug companies use 'Industry Sponsored Teaching' to push their products onto doctors. Once again the public and government are being gamed by big money interests.

Dr Ben Goldacre is an author, broadcaster, medical doctor and academic who rebuts scientific claims from drug companies, newspapers, government reports, and public relations firms. He has written the weekly Bad Science column in the Guardian since 2003, and his book Bad Science (Fourth Estate Ltd, ISBN: 978-0-0072-4019-7), has sold over 400,000 copies and is published in 18 countries. His new book is Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients (4th Estate, ISBN: 978-0-00-735074-2).

http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2536733/ben-goldacre-bad-pharma.asx

Or if you prefer newspaper format:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9633402/Closed-drug-trials-leave-patients-at-risk-and-doctors-in-the-dark.html

And here antidepressants dangerous for unborn child http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9632588/Thousands-of-pregnant-women-at-risk-from-antidepressants-doctors-warn.html

Senior doctors say that “study after study” shows the most widely used class of anti-depressant, called selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, cause pregnancy complications including premature birth and pre-eclampsia, which can both be fatal.
Emerging research also suggests SSRIs can double the rate of autism in children, and increase the risk of lung and bowel diseases.
The situation amounts to “a large scale human experiment”, according to Dr Adam Urato, assistant professor of maternal-fetal medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts.
Drugs firms were overstating the benefits and underplaying the risks for the sake of profit, he claimed. Family doctors were failing to grasp the true dangers and tell pregnant patients of them, he argued.
He said: “Study after study shows increased rates of newborn complications in those babies who were exposed to SSRIs in-utero. The Federal Drugs Administration [in the US] and Health Canada have put out warnings specifically regarding this issue.”

[Alive]

More from Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column:

Dodgy dealings in tough year for whistleblowers
It's been a marvellous year for bullshit and pseudoscience
It's been a marvellous year for bullshit. We saw quantitative evidence showing that drug adverts aimed at doctors are routinely factually inaccurate, while pharmaceutical company ghostwriters were the secret hands behind letters to the Times, and a whole series of academic papers. We saw more drug companies and even regulators withholding evidence from doctors and patients that a drug was dangerous – the most important and neglected ethical issue in modern medicine — and that whistleblowers have a rubbish life....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/17/bad-science-review-of-the-year

Academic publishers run a guarded knowledge economy
The business model for scholarly papers forms a barrier to the public, but can such walls remain standing?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/02/bad-science-academic-publishing

The true purpose of a drug trial is not always obvious
Medical trials are not always conducted to test the drug – sometimes it's to seed the market
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/01/bad-science-drug-trials-seeding-trials

A migraine-inducing libel case
The US medical device company NMT are suing Peter Wilmshurst over his comments about the MIST trial
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/11/migraine-libel-nmt

How security can be more theatre than reality
Drug-detecting dogs and hi-tech brain scans to spot liars – examples of how we are still buying into the placebo effect
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/26/bad-science-sniffer-dog-theory

The statistical error that just keeps on coming
The same statistical errors – namely, ignoring the "difference in differences" – are appearing throughout the most prestigious journals in neuroscience
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/series/badscience?page=2

[goodsamaritan]

Keep this thread going. This is very important.
"They" the pharma monopolies trot out bad press releases to discredit immensely popular foreign herbal concoctions to protect their domestic market.

For example http://www.veracity.org/Tung%20Shuen.html from China.

But the effectiveness of these Chinese pills westerners will understand once you have good translator healer who is caucasian and into TCM.  Watch this video.


http://www.myhealthblog.org/2012/10/27/tung-shueh-pills-cows-head-brand-review-by-tcm-healer-sifu-jen-sam/