– Why oh why was it not a good idea for the American medical industry to have been captured by the corporate world? Â Can you say, “Profits first and people second”?
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Does the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have access to the data it needs to make informed decisions on approving drugs, or are drug companies cherry-picking the studies they publish to make their drugs look better than they actually are?
A new report in Monday’s PLoS Medicine questions whether doctors and patients are getting objective information about whether a medicine works. That’s because more than half of studies on government-approved medications—presumably the ones that show a drug doesn’t work—are never published, and those that are show disproportionately positive results.
Just 43 percent of trials behind 90 drugs approved by the FDA were published in the medical journals most commonly consulted by doctors, according to the report by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco. Of those, 66 percent show the drugs are beneficial. The results are based on 909 clinical trials of medicines approved between 1998 and 2000.
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