An interview with Ben Goldacre, the author of Bad Pharma.
“Trials with positive results are twice as likely to be published as trials with negative results,” Goldacre says. And the results of withheld drug study results can be fatal; for example, over 80,000 US users of the diabetes drug Rosiglitazone have died of heart failure, a fact that Goldacre links to repressed data that emerged in early trials. Meanwhile, aggressive television and print marketing, including manufacturer-sponsored training (par for the course for physicians around the globe), misleads health professionals about the merits and risks of treatment. Equally troubling is the provenance of drugs that haven’t been linked to fatalities: thanks to legislative loopholes, a drug simply has to be shown to be better than nothing in order to make it to market. Goldacre’s accounts of these and other realities make Bad Pharma a galvanizing, compulsively readable exploration of how the medical industry is failing us—and why we need good medicine now more than ever.
