It was interesting to see this show up in The Guardian since it was
reading this by Richard Smith (former editor of the British Medial
Journal)
<http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020138>
that caused me to become so skeptical about drug trials. The article
doesn't mention it but Smith resigned from the BMJ after 25 years
because he said the drug companies had effectively taken over his
journal and he couldn't control it. But he also added that the American
journals were even worse. :-(
Actually, my skepticism goes back even a bit further to when I was a bit
younger and even more naive. I had been taking Lipitor for a couple of
years and was concerned about side effects. In researching the subject
I came across "The Cholesterol Myths" by Swedish physician Uffe
Ravnskov. Not far into the book Ravnskov made the charge that
physicians rarely read technical research papers in their entirety.
They tend to read only the abstracts... a soft spot that dishonest
researchers use to make assertions not actually supported by any of the
research in the following paper.
I was outraged. Ravnskov had to be lying. After all, weren't these
medical papers peer reviewed research? Hah, little did I know! But to
prove it to myself I downloaded two randomly chosen short papers
concerning statin drugs from medline (the U.S. National Library of
Medicine) <http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/> Much to my utter
surprise both papers (just as Ravnskov said) made positive statements
about the effects of statin drugs not supported by any research in those
papers.
The emperor has no clothes.
Chuck Norcutt
On 9/22/2012 9:31 AM, Jez Cunningham wrote:
> Another example of what Chuck's been telling us for ages...
>
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/21/drugs-industry-scandal-ben-goldacre
>
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