Asking the wrong question: how crap research gets drugs to market

May 7th, 2011 by Ben Goldacre in big pharma, numerical context | 26 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 7 May 2011

Some of the biggest problems in medicine don’t get written about, because they’re not about eyecatching things like one patient’s valiant struggle: they’re protected from public scrutiny by a wall of tediousness.

Here is one problem that affects millions of people. What if we had rubbish evidence on whether hundreds of common treatments really work, simply because nobody asked the right research question? A paper published this week looks at how much evidence there was for every one of the new drugs approved by the FDA between 2000 and 2010, at the time they were approved. Read the rest of this entry »

EudraCT, the clinical trials transparency tool held in secret

March 5th, 2011 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, big pharma, conflict of interest, publication bias | 17 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 5 March 2011

The European Medicines Agency now regulate the pharmaceutical industry throughout the whole of Europe. In December 2010 Thomas Lonngren stepped down as their executive director. On the 28th of that month he sent a letter telling the EMA management board that he was going to start working as a private consultant to the pharmaceutical industry, in three days time, on 1 January 2011.
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The year in nonsense

December 17th, 2010 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, big pharma, media | 7 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 18 December 2010

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. Read the rest of this entry »

NMT are suing Dr Wilmshurst. So how trustworthy are this company? Let’s look at their website…

December 11th, 2010 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, big pharma, legal chill, libel | 29 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 11 December 2010

You will hopefully remember – from the era before Wikileaks – that US medical device company NMT are suing NHS cardiologist Peter Wilmshurst over his comments about the conduct and results of the MIST trial, which sadly for NMT found no evidence that their device prevents migraine. The MIST trial was funded by NMT, and Wilmshurst was lead investigator until problems arose.

Wilmshurst has already paid £100,000 of his own money to defend himself, risking his house, and spent every weekend and all his annual leave, unpaid, dealing with this, at great cost to his family. So what kind of a company is NMT Medical, that the British libel courts have allowed to hound one man for almost two years? And how trustworthy are their utterances?

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Degrees of consent

October 29th, 2010 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, big pharma, regulating research | 7 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 23 October 2010

This month it was revealed that US academics funded by NIH deliberately infected mentally incapacitated patients, prison inmates, sex workers, and soldiers from Guatemala with syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid during the 1940s. Read the rest of this entry »

Ghostwriters in the sky

September 18th, 2010 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, big pharma, ghostwriters, regulating research | 42 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 18 September 2010

If I tell you that Katie Price did not, necessarily, write her own book, this is not a revelation. From academics I have slightly higher expectations, but now the legal system has spat out another skip full of documents: this time, we get a new insight into the strange phenomenon of medical ghost-writing. Read the rest of this entry »

The power of anecdotes

August 28th, 2010 by Ben Goldacre in anecdotes, bad science, big pharma, media, statistics | 53 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 28 August 2010

For simpletons and amateurs, there are good research methods, and bad research methods. In reality, different tools are valuable in different situations, and sometimes, even very tiny numbers of people can give you a meaningful piece of information: even an anecdote can be informative. Read the rest of this entry »

Give us the trial data

August 14th, 2010 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, big pharma, libel, publication bias, regulating research | 47 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 14 August 2010

This week the drug company AstraZeneca paid out £125m to settle a class action. Over 17,500 patients claim the company withheld information showing that schizophrenia drug quetiapine (tradename Seroquel) might cause diabetes. Why do companies pay out money before cases get to court?

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I love research about research

July 24th, 2010 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, big pharma, regulating research, spin, subgroup analysis, trial registers | 32 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 24 July 2010

There is a pleasing symmetry in the ropey science you get from different players. When GlaxoSmithKline are confronted with an unflattering meta-analysis summarising the results of all 56 trials on one of their treatments, as we saw last week, their defense is to point at 7 positive trials, exactly as a homeopath would do. Politicians will often find a ray of positive sunshine in a failed policy’s appraisal, and promote that to the sky. Newspapers, similarly, will spin science to fit their political agenda, with surreal consequences (the Telegraph have claimed recently that shopping causes infertility in men, and the Daily Mail reckon housework prevents breast cancer in women).

But does the same thing happen in formal academic research?

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Pharmaco-epidemiology would be fascinating enough even if society didn’t manage it really really badly

July 17th, 2010 by Ben Goldacre in bad science, big pharma, bullying, publication bias, regulating research, trial registers | 22 Comments »

Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 17 July 2010

This week the FDA voted not to ban GlaxoSmithKline’s diabetes drug rosiglitazone (brand name Avandia). Their vote has been reported as a victory for the company. I don’t think so: this saga tells an ugly story about our collective medical incompetence.

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