Drug Companies Dope Their Research -- It's All Good! [1]
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton [2] on
The pharmaceutical industry [3] is using a novel technique to cheer up people who suffer from clinical depression -- only publishing favorable studies about the effects of its antidepressant medications. A new study [4] in the New England Journal of Medicine looked at 74 studies registered with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration [5]. Of the 36 favorable studies, all but one was published. Of the 37 unfavorable studies, all but three were "either not published (22 studies) or published in a way that, in our opinion, conveyed a positive outcome (11 studies)." As Newsweek science writer Sharon Begley observes, "The result of this selective publication is no less than a distortion of science [6] and -- since these are studies that drive what doctors advise their patients to do and what patients ask for -- a perversion of the biomedical system in which untainted results are supposed to benefit public health."