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When you can’t trust drug companies, who can you trust?
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In 2002, four intrepid researchers filed a Freedom of Information Act. But they weren’t looking for information on Guantanamo or revelations from Cheney’s lair. All they wanted was the FDA’s drug analysis data. Taxpayer funded research. They got it. The studies examined were conducted between 1987 and 1999 andcovered Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Serzone, and Effexor. They found, on average, that placebos were 80 percent as effective as the drugs.
Put aside the surprising results: Why didn’t the public know about these studies? Why wasn’t the medical community informed? The answer, as Marcia Angell argues in an important New York Review of Books article, is that our system of clinical evaluation is so riddled with conflicts of interests that “it is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines.”
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