Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks

How reliable are drug trials? You probably think (and hope!) that the results are fair and accurate. Unfortunately, they aren’t always as honest as we’d like them to be.

This is partly because drug trials are extremely costly, and often financed by the drug companies themselves. In order to bring a drug to market, it must surmount a number of obstacles: first, it must pass the initial trials to determine safety, then trials to determine efficacy, and finally a larger-scale trial where it is measured against a placebo or comparable treatment. The total cost is close to a staggering $500 million on average.

Because public entities simply can’t afford to pay that much, 90 percent of clinical drug trials are conducted or commissioned by pharmaceutical companies. These companies therefore have a massive – and some would say unfair – influence over what is researched, and how it is understood and reported.

One outcome is that results of positive trials are published more often than those of negative trials. This is called publication bias, and unfavorable results are often buried.

One example of this is drug companies hiding data that showed that their antidepressant SSRIs were no more effective than a placebo. In fact, there have even been cases in which companies publish the results of a positive trial more than once, to make it seem as if there were corroborating trials supporting their results! For example, one anesthetist compared trial data for a nausea drug only to find the same, slightly reworded results in several studies and journals, thus inflating the drug’s apparent efficacy.

And even when drugs are finally brought to market, drug companies can bury risks or side effects. For example, even though SSRIs are known to cause anorgasmia– i.e., the inability to reach an orgasm – researchers simply didn’t mention it on the list of side effects.

Even if you read the label carefully, you cannot always know how a drug might seriously affect your life.

Now that we have explored some of the ways in which we can be tricked by bad science, the following blinks will help you to determine what qualifies as “good science.”