Drug Research Lies
November 2012
Do you think that the research done by pharmaceutical companies
is honest? Think again. The Guardian newspaper recently reported
on many systematic reviews of drug research which demonstrate
that pharmaceutical industry studies show positive results far
more often than those funded by independent sources. Is this
merely a coincidence? Do they just happen to get more of the
results that they want? It isn't too likely.
Note: JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association)
also reported on how the funding source of research trials seems
to affect the outcome. You can read about that here:
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=202867
It is unlikely that drug companies directly tamper with clinical
drug trials in any criminal way. And they don't necessarily change
the reported results afterwards either. That kind of dishonesty
is probably very rare in drug research, because it isn't necessary.
There are more subtle ways to get the results you want.
First, a company can design a study in a biased way. For example,
even if a study is theoretically double-blind, a company could
create procedures which let doctors administering a new pharmaceutical
product know who is getting it, versus who is getting a placebo.
The expectation of doctors that a patient's condition will improve
has been shown to result in more reported improvement. This obviously
could bias the results. This is a fairly crude manipulation,
but there are certainly other ways to design a study to increase
the chance of positive results.
But the easiest way to manipulate the results of drug research
is to selectively report those results. Recent investigations
show that this is common. Negative data can be hidden or thrown
out. The New York Times reported on how Pfizer did that here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/health/research/08drug.html
To understand why this matters, consider a simple example.
Suppose a new drug is given to ten groups of people who share
a given disease or condition. On average, it appears to help
the people in five of the groups , but the subjects in the other
five groups have no improvement or get worse. This is common,
since people get better or worse for many reasons, and this is
why many trials are necessary to be statistically significant.
Now suppose, in this case, the company decided that only the
five trials with positive results are important enough to report,
and they quietly get rid of the data from the other five. The
result is that a drug which has no proven benefit appears to
have helped patients in every research trial -- every one that
the rest of the world hears about anyhow. This is bad science,
of course, and unfortunately it is just one of the ways that
pharmaceutical companies can play with data.
By the way, scientists have been recommending a simple and
inexpensive solution to this problem for decades. It is a compulsory
international trials register. In order to use the results of
any drug research trials to get a new pharmaceutical approved,
a company would have to register the trial before it begins.
In this way trials that don't give the result wanted can't just
disappear.
Not surprisingly, the drug companies are against this simple
idea. It doesn't allow them as much control over the "truth."
As a result, we can expect dishonest drug research to continue.
Copyright Webhiker LLC - Terms
/ Privacy / Contact |
