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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 80

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: news

Bias seen in U.S. drug study reporting
United Press International 2004 Dec 16


Full text:

A review of 48 U.S. drug studies in the American Journal of Medicine Wednesday showed apparent bias in those sponsored by pharmaceutical companies.

Of the 48, every one of the 30 sponsored papers reported favorable results, while only 12 of the 18 not supported by a pharmaceutical company were positive.

The authors propose three principles for medical societies to maintain the integrity of presentations about commercial products — a requirement for full disclosure of financial support, an explicit policy of accepting negative studies as well as positive studies, and a series of lectures, discussions and debates at the annual meetings to help everyone recognize conflicts of interest and scientific bias.

In an editorial in the same issue, Dr. Seth Landefeld suggests the measures would be insufficient.

“The recommended steps are eminently reasonable and hopelessly inadequate,” he wrote. “Disclosure of financial conflicts of interest likely has limited effects and may not eliminate bias or its effects on practice.”

Rather, he suggested the creation of an independent agency funded by pooled resources from the pharmaceutical industry that would sponsor such drug studies.

 

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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