Showing posts with label misleading the public. Show all posts
Showing posts with label misleading the public. Show all posts

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Drug Firms Mislead Public

Cherry picking data is one ploy used to deliberately mis-inform the public, regulators and providers who ultimately prescribe the pharmaceuticals.

Cherry picking is where you report only flattering data, and ignore or bury data you don't like.

For example:
Drug firms hiding negative research are unfit to experiment on people
Another pharmaceutical giant has settled a big compensation claim. So why are they allowed to go on misleading the public?
But in among all these important negative findings, on a few measures of "cognitive functioning" – an attention task, a verbal memory test – Seroquel did better. This finding alone was published in a research paper in 2002. AstraZeneca kept quiet about the fact that patients on Seroquel had worse outcomes for schizophrenia. The research paper went on to become a highly influential piece of work, cited by more than 100 academic research papers. Many researchers can only dream of publishing such a well cited piece of work."
Read Ben Goldacres's complete article