Bad PharmaBad Pharma
Argues that doctors are deliberately misinformed by profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies who withhold information about drug efficacy and side effects, explaining pharmaceutical data manipulation and its consequences.
Dr. Goldacre provides an eye-opening insider's perspective on the drug development process, how the pharmaceutical industry manipulates clinical trial data to produce positive outcomes for their products, and how regulators and medical journals have aided and abetted them. The London-based writer concludes with calls for better data and tips for what can be done to promote change, e.g., greater regulation of industry ads and payments to doctors. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
We like to imagine that medicine is based on evidence and the results of fair testing and clinical trials. In reality, those tests and trials are often profoundly flawed. We like to imagine that doctors who write prescriptions for everything from antidepressants to cancer drugs to heart medication are familiar with the research literature about a drug, when in reality much of the research is hidden from them by drug companies. We like to imagine that doctors are impartially educated, when in reality much of their education is funded by the pharmaceutical industry. We like to imagine that regulators have some code of ethics and let only effective drugs onto the market, when in reality they approve useless drugs, with data on side effects casually withheld from doctors and patients.
All these problems have been shielded from public scrutiny because they're too complex to capture in a sound bite. But Ben Goldacre shows that the true scale of this murderous disaster fully reveals itself only when the details are untangled. He believes we should all be able to understand precisely how data manipulation works and how research misconduct in the medical industry affects us on a global scale.
With Goldacre's characteristic flair and a forensic attention to detail, Bad Pharmareveals a shockingly broken system and calls for regulation. This is the pharmaceutical industry as it has never been seen before.
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- New York : Faber and Faber, 2013.
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