“For a drug company, a favourable trial is worth thousands of pages of advertising, which is why a company will sometimes spend upwards of a million dollars on reprints of the trial for worldwide distribution.” “A large trial published in a major journal has the journal’s stamp of approval, will be distributed around the world, and may well receive global media coverage, particularly if promoted simultaneously by press releases from both the journal and the expensive public-relations firm hired by the pharmaceutical company that sponsored the trial. “Far from discounting these, journal readers see randomized controlled trials as one of the highest forms of evidence. “A much bigger problem lies with the original studies, particularly these clinical trials published by medical journals. He explained the problem in his Public Library of Science journal article called “ Medical Journals Are an Extension of the Marketing Arm of Pharmaceutical Companies”: * Richard Smith (editor of the British Medical Journal for 25 years). “The results of all the trials (there may be many) are submitted to the FDA, and if one or two trials are positive – that is, they show effectiveness without serious risk – the drug is usually approved, even if all the other trials are negative.”īut there’s an even bigger problem with clinical trials, according to Dr.

“Before a new drug can enter the market, its manufacturer must sponsor clinical trials to show the Food and Drug Administration that the drug is safe and effective, usually as compared with a placebo or dummy pill.

Marcia Angell, who wrote the following in her frightening landmark piece called “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption” (New York Review of Books, ): For a basic introduction to clinical trials, let’s turn to former editor-in-chief of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Every prescription drug (or over-the-counter medication) in your bathroom cabinet is there because it’s been evaluated in research called a clinical trial.

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