Check It Out

Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients
Ben Goldacre
Faber and Faber, 2013
New Book Shelf: call number RM 301.27 G65 2013

Just reviewing this book caused me to lose some faith in my doctor’s ability to prescribe the best medicine for me! Americans can rest a little easier than Goldacre’s British readers since the author is English. This means when he discusses the medical system and regulations placed on the pharmaceutical industry he is referring to those in his country. However, most of the book can be applied to the U.S. pharmaceutical industry.

In the introduction to this work Goldacre (also the author of Bad Science) states, “So, to be clear, this whole book is about meticulously defending every assertion in the paragraph that follows. Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small number of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments.” They may also be tested by universities using grants from the pharmaceutical companies. “Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don’t like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only see a distorted picture of any drug’s true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in a drug’s life, and even then they don’t give this data to doctors and patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion.” Academic papers “…are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the [drug] companies, without disclosure. Sometimes whole academic journals are even owned outright by one drug company.” In addition, doctors may be receiving payments from pharmaceutical companies.

As one reviewer stated, the conclusions of the author are only as good as the studies he bases his thesis on, however, putting some of his recommendations into action could only improve the situation.