Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients

by Ben Goldacre

‘Bad Science’ hilariously exposed the tricks that quacks and journalists use to distort science, becoming a 400,000 copy bestseller. Now Ben Goldacre puts the $600bn global pharmaceutical industry under the microscope. What he reveals is a fascinating, terrifying mess.

Doctors and patients need good scientific evidence to make informed decisions. But instead, companies run bad trials on their own drugs, which distort and exaggerate the benefits by design. When these trials produce unflattering results, the data is simply buried. All of this is perfectly legal. In fact, even government regulators withhold vitally important data from the people who need it most. Doctors and patient groups have stood by too, and failed to protect us. Instead, they take money and favours, in a world so fractured that medics and nurses are now educated by the drugs industry.

Patients are harmed in huge numbers.

Ben Goldacre is Britain’s finest writer on the science behind medicine, and ‘Bad Pharma’ is a clear and witty attack, showing exactly how the science has been distorted, how our systems have been broken, and how easy it would be to fix them.

• ISBN13: 9780007350742
• Publish Date: 27 September 2012 (first published 25 September 2012)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 30 August 2013
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Imprint: Fourth Estate Ltd
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 448
• Language: English
• URL: http://harpercollins.co.uk

Reviews

[wyvernfriend]

We don't regulate our drugs and the drug companies enough and insist on ensuring that data about the edges of results, I begin to wonder if the drug companies had previous seen the side-effects I suffered with a blood pressure medication and if I could have avoided hundreds of euro in specialist fees in discovering this MYSELF!

Interesting look at how drug companies present their goods and how the love of money is indeed the root of many evils.