On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 14:19, George
Herbert<george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 3:38 PM,
SlimVirgin<slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
We would not allow the people who make Coca Cola
to be our sole
sources on whether it's safe, or on whether we all ought to be
drinking it. But when it comes to drugs and scientists, we lose sight
of the fact that there is often a very strong conflict of interest.
Sarah
There's a societal problem there; we don't independently pay for many
scientific grade studies on medications. There are some - but the
bulk of them are done by the drug companies in the course of getting
drugs studied and approved, and then as ongoing due dilligence as
they're used.
There's an interesting article here: Angell, Marcia.
"Industry-Sponsored Clinical Research. A Broken System", The Journal
of the American Medical Association, September 3, 2008
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/extract/300/9/1069
She writes: "Over the past 2 decades, the pharmaceutical industry has
gained unprecedented control over the evaluation of its own products.
Drug companies now finance most clinical research on prescription
drugs, and there is mounting evidence that they often skew the
research they sponsor to make their drugs look better and safer."
I think we need to take very seriously that we're allowing a lot of
our science articles to be sourced entirely to studies paid for by big
corporations selling products.
Isn't that a problem of society, that we have raised the cost of
bringing a drug to market to such a level that few can do it? And if the
drug companies aren't going to be funding the clinical research who is?
There are valid concerns for ensuring that there are oversights such
that they don't get away with cooking the evidence, and that if the
evidence is cooked they pay a very high price. But that isn't a reason
to populate that drug pages with every bit of FUD that comes along.