Has The Science Been Lost in Big Pharma?

Over the last year I wrote to several leading science journalists and scientists, one of whom was lamenting the loss of two major drug companies to neuroscience. They didn't want to develop drugs for the brain any more, and while I sighed with relief, others were calling it a tragic loss to brain medicine. In my letters I explained the following: 1) We don't yet fully understand the normal brain and how it functions. 2) We don't yet know what causes schizophrenia and 3) we prescribe expensive and risky drugs, based on what exactly? The science just isn't there to justify millions of presciptions, to millions of people across dozens of different drugs. But not only are we taking them in large quatities, we are also forced or intimidated by the health authorities to take them.

One of the people I wrote to was Ben Goldacre, a journalist and author, who has recently published his new book, Bad Pharma, published by The Fourth Estate. Even though he never replied to me, I read an excerpt from his book on the Guardian website and in it he describes an industry that has lost all sense of scientific rigour, lies to and manipulates doctors, withholds vital data, and issues drugs that are not only completely useless, but also cause unpleasant and dangerous side effects. The drug companies are not held to account by the regulators and they are deliberately using ineffective regulations to push drugs that have very iffy efficacy data. Goldacre says that 'Because researchers are free to bury any result they please, patients are exposed to harm on a staggering scale throughout the whole of medicine. Doctors can have no idea about the true effects of the treatments they give.' This admission is just unbelievable. The trouble is though, governments and politicians cannot move against big pharma to sort this out, because of lobbyists, who will hound and buy off politicians, with offers to fund campaigns. In America if the government moved to tighten regulations, the right would block any major restrictions against dodgy drugs. The reason for this is that because a lot of drugs are implicated in this scandal, the pharmaceutical industry would be threatened with almost total collaspe. Goldacre claims that so many drugs are ineffective, with masses of withheld data, held back by drug companies, that every type of illness would be effected, from anti-depressives to statins.

Also, Goldacre explains about one scientific journal who published an article about the scandal. The journal Jama, explained the situation and the regulator in Denmark, Lif, went on the offensive and attempted to refer the authors to the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty. They presented zero scientific evidence that the authors had been dishonest, but the investigation was conducted any way, eventually being dropped after a couple of months. This is what doctors can expect who don't tow the line of a system that has lost all perspective about scientific rigour in medicine. And in the meantime we all suffer.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/21/drugs-industry-scandal-ben-goldacre