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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16818

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Goldacre B
Is the conflict of interest unacceptable when drug companies conduct trials on their own drugs? Yes
BMJ 2009 Nov 29; 339:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/339/nov27_1/b4949


Abstract:

The practice of medicine is based on evidence. We need this evidence base to be complete, and of the highest quality, so that we can make the right decisions, but at present, drug companies produce most of the evidence we use. There is no doubt that these companies have a conflict of interest when they conduct trials: they want to sell their products, and so naturally they want a positive result from the trials they sponsor. But there is now good evidence from systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and case studies that this conflict of interest results in bad evidence, which distorts medical decision making and so harms patients.

We will start with a tangible story, from a single field. Rochon1 analysed the literature on non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), and found all the studies that had ever been published where one NSAID was compared to another. In every single trial, the sponsoring . . .

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909