Reddit reviews Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients

His book on the subject is very upsetting. A must-read for anyone in medicine.

Well, be glad you're not a Kindle user: many e-books on Amazon are more than their harcopy equivalents.

Example.

Anyone interested in this, and how it affects them, should read the book Bad Pharma

Highly recommended, and though a little hysterical in parts, absolutely true.

> but has a huge and positive impact on their lives

Actually, I've read a lot of criticism about the EMA, particularly about its lack of transparency in terms of data and clinical studies but also in general not regulating drug approval scientifically. Not that the US's agency is much superior (the book linked above is mostly about the US).

I read an interesting book a while back that ties in to some of what you are saying. It details how the pharaceutical industry does not report negative results from medical & pharmaceutical trials - they only report favorable results. And, because of that, scientists, doctors, and consumers are not given the complete picture of the risks and benefits of a given medication. Goldacre argues that ithould be mandatory for drug companies to release ALL DATA - favorable or not. Really interesting & informative read.

https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Pharma-Companies-Mislead-Patients/dp/0865478007

I learned not long ago that our family's first microwave oven (1970s) was a pharma gift to my uncle, an oral surgeon. He didn't want it, gave it to us.

Years later (1980s), I was scrounging for food in my sister's house, and stumbled across these jars of jelly; when I opened them, they had a wax seal on top. Gift from pharma to my BIL. Sis told me to tuck in, they were free, a gift from pharma.

Sis's decadal birthday celebration was held at pharma's expense.

I forget what all else, but it's a seemingly unending flow of goodies and trinkets from thinly veiled bribery to writing pads and expensive gimmicky pens.

BIL goes on junkets around the country, talking about how wonderful Drug X is; gets put up in the best hotels, speaks for half an hour, goes home with an extra few thousand and a free trip. And he doesn't work in what is considered a particularly lucrative specialty, either.

Goldacre's Bad Pharma is an excellent book on what pharma does to get what they want.

And those fears are understandable: we all have anxiety about our meds, and what benefits we may derive from them. The problem is there are no long-term studies indicating CRABs are effective at maintaining remission, and (worse) relapse rate is not indicative of long-term disability anyway. The only one that has shown promise in the long run is Tysabri, which has that nasty brain thing going on, too.

I have a good friend with MS, and I don't tell her the Avonex probably does nothing for her, as there is the possibility she is deriving benefit from the placebo effect. Most of these MS drugs have horribly skewed clinical results because the ones that don't derive benefit from the drugs tend to drop out; the ones that stay on the drugs tend to have milder MS, and/or derive more benefit from the drug, skewing the results. These are very expensive medications, and it is reasonable to anticipate that the research behind them may be biased by the pharmaceutical companies; see Ben Goldacre's excellent Bad Pharma.

Interestingly, low uric acid is tied with MS relapses. There are ways to boost your uric acid levels (uric acid causes gout, and folks with MS relapses are at the opposite end of the scale of those with gout), which may reduce your rate of relapses.

Bad pharma Ben Goldacre

I don't think it's as widely accepted in science as you claim it is.

Here is a meta analysis of all of the trials submitted to the FDA for licensing of 4 anti-depressant drugs: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0050045

They found that when you put all the data together the difference between placebo and anti-depressant is negligible. Even in severely depressed patients the difference was clinically insignificant. In any case if you thought that these drugs were effective then this is not what you would expect after collating all of the data.

Not only that, but there is also evidence suggesting that antidepressants may actually make long term outcomes for patients worse than if they never took any treatment at all.

Here is a page that offers a host of studies into long term outcomes: http://robertwhitaker.org/robertwhitaker.org/Depression.html

If you are really interested in hearing criticisms of the current treatment of mental illness then I recommend you check out some of these books:

Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good

Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients

Anatomy of an Epidemic

The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth

The Myth of the Chemical Cure

Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How big pharma has corrupted healthcare

The points I'd make have already been made, so I won't repeat them. But if people are interested about this topic and the pharmaceutical industry in general, I learnt a lot from Ben Goldacre's book - Bad Pharma and I'd recommend it. He talks a lot about drug companies and marketing.