slimvictor
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Dec 29, 2008
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TEDTalks can sometimes portray science in triumphalist tones, with fabulous innovations that are changing the world forever. But the real action in science is often around dirty, messy, angry problems, and my TEDTalk is about the dirtiest I've seen yet.
Doctors need the results of clinical trials to make informed choices, with their patients, about which treatment to use. But the best currently available evidence estimates that half of all clinical trials, for the treatments we use today, have never been published. This problem is the same for industry-sponsored trials and independent academic studies, across all fields of medicine from surgery to oncology, and it represents an enormous hidden hole for everything we do. Doctors can't make informed decisions, when half the evidence is missing.
Most people react to this situation with incredulity, because it's so obviously absurd. How can medics, academics, and legislators have permitted such a huge problem to persist? The answer is simple. This territory has been policed -- and aggressively -- by the pharmaceutical industry. They have worked hard to shut down public discussion on the topic, for several decades, with great success.
They say, for example, that the problem is modest, and that critics have cherrypicked the evidence: but this is a lie. The best evidence comes from the most current review of all the literature, published in 2010. It estimates that half of all completed trials are left unpublished, and that trials with negative results are about twice as likely to be buried.
cont at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-goldacre/prescription-drugs_b_3018272.html