Public Accounts Committee issues damning report on clinical trial results being withheld

January 3rd, 2014 by Ben Goldacre in alltrials campaign, badpharma | 1 Comment »

Screenshot 2014-01-03 21.55.17MPs on the UK parliament’s Public Accounts Committee today issued one of the most damning reports ever seen on the problem of clinical trial results being withheld. Their amazement at the extent of the problem is palpable. This is a fantastic result for the campaign that started with Iain Chalmers et al many years ago, grew with the publication of Bad Pharma, and is now transformed into a vast behemoth with widespread support at AllTrials. You can read the Committee’s report in full here, and see the video of the evidence session with me and Fi Godlee from the BMJ here. I should say, I’ve been hugely impressed by the MPs I’ve come into contact with on this issue.

There has been extensive media coverage so far, some of the best (the ones that go beyond the Committee’s press release…) can be found in: the Independent, the Telegraph, the BBC, PharmaTimes and the Times (regarding that last article, I wonder if Bina Rawal of the ABPI will come to regret claiming that Richard Bacon, the deputy chair of the highly influential Public Accounts Committee, has been misleading people: the current regime at the ABPI do seem rather clumsy, more on their activities to come). Next, here is an article by David Tovey, head of Cochrane, one from Ginny Barbour, the big medical cheese at PLOS, and here is the BMJ news piece. Here’s a comment piece by Matt Ridley in the Times (caution: contains climate lols), and here’s a comment piece from me in The Guardian. There’ll be an editorial in the BMJ shortly.

There’s also extensive commentary in our press release at AllTrials.net. Here’s my bit from that press release: Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s our letter to the GMC, about addressing systemic failures in the medical profession

December 17th, 2013 by Ben Goldacre in badpharma, competing interests, conflict of interest, publication bias, regulating research | No Comments »

The GMC are focused mainly on the narrow issue of an individual doctor’s competence when seeing individual patients. But there are broader issues that have an equally important impact on patient care and public trust: failure to publish clinical trials, failure to participate in research, and imperfectly declared conflicts of interest, for example.

The Health Select Committee have an annual review with the GMC to discuss how they’re getting on. Here’s a letter I wrote to them, along with Iain Chalmers, Fiona Godlee and Trish Groves of the BMJ, and Ginny Barbour from PLoS. We suggest some actions the GMC could take to improve patient care on all these issues. Below that is the video of the committee raising our concerns with the GMC. Broadly speaking: the GMC said they’d have a think. This is forward movement, and there’s more to come next year, with the launch of something interesting, new, and fun (and currently a bit secret…). Read the rest of this entry »

The very strange saga of the “Ethical Standards in Health and Life Sciences Group”

December 17th, 2013 by Ben Goldacre in ABPI, badpharma, ESHLSG | 2 Comments »

Still catching up on posting things from this year. Here’s a piece I wrote in the BMJ with medical student colleagues about an extraordinary, influential, and rather depressing organisation called the “Ethical Standards in Health and Life Sciences Group”. This was a committee of the great and good in medicine, co-chaired by Sir Richard Thompson of the Royal College of Physicians, and Deepak Khanna of the ABPI (the chap who very oddly claimed that I refused to meet him). Read the rest of this entry »

New super cheap edition of Bad Pharma, with extra chapter, and: Waterstones Book Club!

October 3rd, 2013 by Ben Goldacre in alltrials campaign, badpharma, book | 5 Comments »

newbook

RIGHT. Sorry to be absent, I’m back from outer space.

NOW. There’s a new cheap edition of Bad Pharma out this month, with a new and very long extra chapter on everything that’s happened since the first edition came out. There are goodies and baddies galore, I’ll be writing about it all over the next few weeks, but if you’re impatient, there’s lots on the AllTrials website already.

Before that, Bad Pharma is Waterstones Book Club “Book of the Week“. This means it’s discounted, and out on the tables in Waterstones. More importantly, there’s a podcast discussion, and a book club reading guide. These are often great fun, and it’s worth checking out some of the others: they give suggested discussion points, this one has a piece by me on why I wrote the book, and how medical leaders have failed to address the problem of missing trials.

They also asked me to write about how I write, so there’s a splurge at the end about the huge synchronising data monster I’ve built to hoover up and organise knowledge. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

The reading guide is here:

www.waterstones.com/wat/images/special/pdf/9780007498086_reading_guide.pdf

You can buy the new super cheap edition of Bad Pharma here:

www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/ben+goldacre/bad+pharma/9640023/

There’s a Waterstones book club podcast on Bad Pharma here:

blog.waterstones.com/2013/09/book-club-bad-pharma/

And as always: remember to sign up to www.alltrials.net, our campaign to stop clinical trial results being withheld from doctors, patients and researchers. We cannot make informed decisions about which treatment is best, as long as this information is being casually withheld. History shows that quiet backroom activity has failed to fix the problem: loud, public scrutiny is the only hope we have, and that means you.

Onward!