He's a physician who writes mostly about bad science reporting, pseudo-science and quackery and Bad Pharma is all about the tricks that pharmaceutical companies get up to to ensure that trials with negative outcomes never see the light of day and to try and spin their products in the best posible light - like telling doctors that drug X is more effective than a placebo, but failing to mention that it's no more effective than existing drugs on the market. Ultimately, if the doctors who are prescribing the drug don't have the complete picture, how are they supposed to make an informed choice about what to give you?
I heard him talk a few weeks ago and while I might not call him 100% unbiased (I think that some of his allegations are a touch exaggerated in terms of their potential harm) he's definitely very interesting and eye-opening.
Buried inside this depressing article is a depressing story about a non-needle-stick syringe that has been prevented from hitting the market. There are a lot of innovation proof system and people within hospitals, good on you if you break through it all. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1007.blake.ht...
It's worth mentioning that there is some good news on the horizon here. Bad Pharma has prompted the UK government into action (ok, proposals of action) on unpublished trials:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2267966/
And more recently, the proposed UK copyright reform - also expected to become legislation in the next year - included a specific fair dealing right for data mining on journals, like the work of Ionnadis. The publishers had been arguing that this was a separate right from reading (which the researchers have already paid for)
http://www.out-law.com/en/articles/2012/june/publishers-and-...
(link is to discussion of the older Hargreaves report; the exception made it into the final proposal)
He's a physician who writes mostly about bad science reporting, pseudo-science and quackery and Bad Pharma is all about the tricks that pharmaceutical companies get up to to ensure that trials with negative outcomes never see the light of day and to try and spin their products in the best posible light - like telling doctors that drug X is more effective than a placebo, but failing to mention that it's no more effective than existing drugs on the market. Ultimately, if the doctors who are prescribing the drug don't have the complete picture, how are they supposed to make an informed choice about what to give you?
I heard him talk a few weeks ago and while I might not call him 100% unbiased (I think that some of his allegations are a touch exaggerated in terms of their potential harm) he's definitely very interesting and eye-opening.