Sunday, April 7, 2013

Be Skeptical of Pharmaceutical Company Claims

Be Skeptical of Pharmaceutical Company Claims


Ben Goldacre's TEDTalk describes the selective bias in research and publishing which strongly favors articles with positive outcomes. In my field of psychiatry, this bias is only the tip of the iceberg. In many cases, the articles are not even written by the scientists whose names appear on them. They are "ghostwritten" by drug company minions.
In my role as a medical expert in product liability lawsuits against drug companies, judges have empowered me to dig into the otherwise secret interiors of drug company data vaults...

Published articles about psychiatric drugs frequently fail to reflect the actual results of the study. After the FDA rejected an antidepressant clinical trial for failing to demonstrate effectiveness, the pharmaceutical company authored a paper based on the same study that was manipulated to show a positive outcome.

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