Thursday, August 11, 2016

Of Drugs and Canaries


Saying There’s a real problem in the way that clinical trials report their results,” reform-minded Ben Goldacre argues that “Statins are the canary in the cage for problems in modern medicine.”
This isn’t strictly math, but is an important read on how clinical research gets “fiddled” with:

From the piece:
"[clinical] Outcome priorities are changed; negative results are omitted; trials are foreshortened or extended to better massage the data. In the book [Big Pharma], Goldacre terms these tactics 'a quiet and diffuse scandal.'"

…and to think there was a day, not so long ago, when Big Pharma was trying to convince folks that statins (“the most commonly prescribed medication in the developed world”) ought be added routinely to municipal water supplies. 


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