Want to learn the ideas in Bad Pharma better than ever? Read the world’s #1 book summary of Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre here.
Read a brief 1-Page Summary or watch video summaries curated by our expert team. Note: this book guide is not affiliated with or endorsed by the publisher or author, and we always encourage you to purchase and read the full book.
Video Summaries of Bad Pharma
We’ve scoured the Internet for the very best videos on Bad Pharma, from high-quality videos summaries to interviews or commentary by Ben Goldacre.
1-Page Summary of Bad Pharma
Overview
It’s time to acknowledge some harsh truths about the pharmaceutical industry: Drug companies are responsible for testing their own drugs, which means that they can manipulate trial results and research data. They also have a vested interest in publishing only positive studies, even if those studies aren’t completely accurate. Doctors rely on information from sales reps, colleagues and journals—all of which may be biased towards the drug companies’ interests.
Drugs are first developed in a lab, then tested on animals and finally humans. After that, they go through the process of regulation. This is when drugs are cleared for market by intentionally distorting their effects.
In this passage, we will examine how pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing and advertising than research and development. We’ll also look at the biased information about drugs that doctors get 40 years after they graduate from medical school. Finally, we’ll discuss what can be done to fix these problems.
Missing Data
Sponsors get the answer they want
Since 2010, many clinical trials have been found to favor the sponsor’s product. A 2007 survey found that pharmaceutical industry-funded studies were 20 times more likely than government-funded ones to be positive. Another study in 2006 determined that competing drugs beat a sponsor’s drug 28% of the time in head-to-head trials.
Drug companies sponsor trials that are designed to get positive results. There are several ways they do this: They conduct flawed trials, select patients who will respond positively to the drug, or stop a trial early when it looks like the drug is working. But there’s also one simple way of manipulating data on a drug: Trials with negative results aren’t published.
Those who conduct medical research should publish the results of all trials. If companies or researchers don’t have to do this, they will stop doing good research and only focus on what seems like it will benefit them. That can lead to people getting hurt or dying from their drug’s bad side effects which are discovered after a new drug is released. We’ve seen that happen in some cases where drugs were tested but the tests didn’t go well so no one knew about them and those people could have been saved if the company had shared that information with everyone else.
Because researchers can skew results, some truths never see the light of day.
How much data is missing and why?
The reason we do systematic reviews and meta-analyses is to prevent cherry-picking of information. We can’t trust that the information we get is accurate if it’s not complete. Missing trial results are dangerous because they mislead everyone in the medical community. It’s impossible to estimate how bad this problem really is, but data suppression has been going on for a long time as a result of publishing biases. Vital negative results are systematically repressed, which affects doctors, patients and study participants alike.
Have you heard of publication bias? It’s a complicated set of factors that prevent negative studies from being published. Basically, it’s the idea that people prefer positivity over negativity and therefore don’t want to see negative results. Even when researchers should reproduce positive research with negative results, they submit only positive findings because they fear their work won’t be accepted.
What can be done?
However, there is hope. More open-access academic journals have been created that publish any trial reports. Any gagging clauses should be abolished so that companies cannot suppress information from studies. Professional bodies should also make all data public and if they do not comply, their names should be posted in a database accessible to the public. Ethics committees can monitor the suppression of information as well
