Skip to contentWillowOne's PositionsTagsWhat’s newMediaStatisticsSearch
WillowOne's Positions

Bad Pharma

Overview

Subtitled How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients, this is the sequel to Bad Science with the jokes largely removed. Goldacre's charge is structural rather than personal: trials with unflattering results go unpublished, so the evidence doctors see is a biased sample; trials are designed against placebos or under-dosed comparators rather than the best existing treatment; regulators hold data they will not release; and the information that reaches prescribers is paid for by the people selling the product. Each chapter ends with what could be done about it, and the book led directly to the AllTrials campaign for the registration and reporting of every clinical trial.

Notes

The most important thing this book taught me is that survivorship bias is not just a trap for individuals but can be built into an entire evidence base. If half the trials vanish, a systematic review of the other half is honestly conducted and still wrong. That is why I treat "the studies show" as the beginning of a question rather than the end of one, and why I am more sympathetic to people who distrust pharmaceutical companies than to the conclusions they usually draw from it: the right response to hidden data is to demand the data, not to take up homeopathy.

Also see