“Bad Pharma”, Ben Goldacre’s new book. A British doctor and
science writer, he made his name in 2008 with “Bad Science”, in which he
filleted the credulous coverage given in the popular press to the claims of
homeopaths, reiki therapists, Hopi ear-candlers and other purveyors of
ceremonious placebos. Now he has taken aim at a much bigger and more important
target: the $600-billion pharmaceutical industry that develops and produces the
drugs prescribed by real doctors the world over.
The book is slightly technical, eminently readable,
consistently shocking, occasionally hectoring and unapologetically polemical.
“Medicine is broken,” it declares on its first page, and “the people you should
have been able to trust to fix [its] problems have failed you.” Dr Goldacre
describes the routine corruption of what is supposed to be an objective
scientific process designed to assess whether new drugs work, whether they are
better than drugs already on the market and whether their side effects are a
price worth paying for any benefits they might convey. The result is that
doctors, and the patients they treat, are hobbled by needless ignorance.
So, for instance, pharmaceutical companies bury clinical
trials which show bad results for a drug and publish only those that show a
benefit. The trials are often run on small numbers of unrepresentative
patients, and the statistical analyses are massaged to give as rosy a picture
as possible. Entire clinical trials are run not as trials at all, but as
under-the-counter advertising campaigns designed to persuade doctors to
prescribe a company’s drug.
The bad behaviour extends far beyond the industry itself.
Drug regulators, who do get access to some of the hidden results, often guard
them jealously, even from academic researchers, seeming to serve the interests
of the firms whose products they are supposed to police. Medical journals
frequently fail to perform basic checks on the papers they print, so all sorts
of sharp practice goes uncorrected.
Many published studies are not written by the academics
whose names they bear, but by commercial ghostwriters paid by drug firms.
Doctors are bombarded with advertising encouraging them to prescribe certain
drugs.
(Más)
Bad Pharma. By Ben Goldacre. Fourth Estate; 430 pages; £13.99. To be published in America in January by Faber and Faber; $28.
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