Think your doctor gets all the scientific evidence on a drug before it gets to market? Not necessarily. Half of the research data on drugs is not readily available to physicians, as the U.K.’s Ben Goldacre reveals in his book, Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients. He discussed the problem— and proposed some potential solutions. What led you to write this book? These are all very well-documented problems in medicine. They’ve only really been described in the technical professional literature. I wanted to write about them for a broader audience. If you look at the problem with missing clinical trial data, we’ve known about this for three decades now. And we failed to fix it behind closed doors. Exactly how much data is missing? Overall, for the treatments that we currently use today, the chances of a trial being published are around 50 percent. The trials with positive results are about twice [as likely] to be published as trials with negative results. So, we’re missing half of the evidence that we’re supposed to be using to make informed decisions. [And] we’re not just missing any old half, we’re selectively missing the unflattering half. What can be done about this? After the book came out [in the U.K.], a Parliamentary Science and Technology Select Committee inquiry was announced to look at the problem of missing clinical trial data. Other Parliamentary inquiries started looking into the problem. We realized that this needed some kind of organizing force, so along with the British Medical Journal and Sense About Science and The Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University, I set up a campaign called alltrials.net, asking for three things. First thing, we want to know about all the clinical trials that have happened on all of the medicines that we use. Including the previous ones. And that’s very important. Not just all the ones from now, because that won’t fix anything for another 25 years. We need to know [about past hidden trials] because 80% to 85% of … Continue reading How Drug Companies Distort Science: Q&A with Ben Goldacre