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Sunday, September 23rd, 2012

The Drugs Don’t Work: a Modern Medical Scandal

Author:     BEN GOLDACRE
Source:     The Guardian (U.K.)
Publication Date:     Friday 21 September 2012 18.00 EDT
 Link: The Drugs Don’t Work: a Modern Medical Scandal
Stephan:   This is an excellent and very insightful account of what has happened in Big Pharma's quest for profit above health. Although the physician author is based in the U.K., his comments apply to the U.S. as well. If it doesn't scare you, you're not paying attention. I hope all the physicians who are readers particularly take this to heart. Irving Kirsch, Associate Director of the Program in Placebo Studies, a lecturer in medicine at the Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, professor of psychology at Plymouth University in the United Kingdom, and professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Hull, United Kingdom, and the University of Connecticut has published many papers showing that anti-depressants in general do little better, or even not as well as placebos. It is hard not to see the entire anti-depressant industry as anything other than a multi-billion scam.

This is an edited extract from Bad Pharma, by Ben Goldacre, published next week by Fourth Estate.

Reboxetine is a drug I have prescribed. Other drugs had done nothing for my patient, so we wanted to try something new. I’d read the trial data before I wrote the prescription, and found only well-designed, fair tests, with overwhelmingly positive results. Reboxetine was better than a placebo, and as good as any other antidepressant in head-to-head comparisons. It’s approved for use by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (the MHRA), which governs all drugs in the UK. Millions of doses are prescribed every year, around the world. Reboxetine was clearly a safe and effective treatment. The patient and I discussed the evidence briefly, and agreed it was the right treatment to try next. I signed a prescription.

But we had both been misled. In October 2010, a group of researchers was finally able to bring together all the data that had ever been collected on reboxetine, both from trials that were published and from those that had never appeared in academic papers. When all this trial data was put together, it produced a shocking picture. Seven trials had been conducted comparing reboxetine […]

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