Is Evidence-Based Medicine Only an Illusion?

By Kristina Fiore, Staff Writer, MedPage Today Published: February 23, 2013 In a system where half of all clinical trials never see the light of publication, doctors are merely "imagining that we're practicing evidence-based medicine," says Ben Goldacre, MBBS, a British physician and science journalist. Goldacre is among the most vocal critics of drugmakers who refuse to hand over complete clinical trial data, making it impossible for doctors and patients to get the full picture on most of the medicines widely used today. He decries the industry's behavior in his new book, Bad Pharma, which in itself is a review of the evidence on evidence review and the stumbling blocks incurred by researchers who try to dig deeper. He'd like to see all of the clinical study reports ever completed brought out of "dry storage archive...and everywhere else that people stack their old, crinkly, yellow paperwork" and made publicly available -- ideally on his new website, AllTrials.net, which recently signed on GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to release every study the company has ever done. During a promotional tour in the U.S., Goldacre answered questions from MedPage Today, in an abbreviated form on camera and in this edited, in-depth Q&A: Kristina Fiore: What piqued your interested in the issue of missing data? Ben Goldacre, MBBS: What's really interesting about the phenomenon of trials going missing in action is that it's not an anecdote; it's not a one-off problem. It's this systemic flaw that'...
Source: PharmaGossip - Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: Source Type: blogs