Bad pharma
Subtitle: how drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients
By: Ben Goldacre
Edition: 1st American ed.
Publisher: Faber and Faber; Faber and Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2013
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 426
ISBN-13: 9780865478008
Subjects: Pharmaceutical industry; Moral and ethical aspects; Quality control; Clinical trials; Drugs; Testing
Description: We like to imagine that medicine is based on evidence and the results of fair tests. In reality, those tests are often profoundly flawed. We like to imagine that doctors are familiar with the research literature about a drug, when in reality much of the research is hidden from them by drug companies. We like to imagine that doctors are impartially educated, when in reality much of their education is funded by the pharmaceutical industry. We like to imagine that regulators let only effective drugs onto the market, when in reality they approve useless drugs, with data on side effects casually withheld from doctors and patients. All these problems have been shielded from public scrutiny because they're too complex to capture in a sound bite. But Ben Goldacre shows that the true scale of this murderous disaster fully reveals itself only when the details are untangled. He believes we should all be able to understand precisely how data manipulation works and how research misconduct on a global scale affects us. This book reveals a shockingly broken system and calls for something to be done.--From publisher description.
Notes: "Originally published in 2012 by Fourth Estate, Great Britain"--T.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 371-405) and index.
Table of contents: title: Intro; title: Missing data; title: Where do new drugs come from?; title: Bad regulators; title: Bad trials; title: Bigger, simpler trials; title: Marketing; title: Afterword: better data.