Several years ago I wrote a few blogs about the scandal of statins. Beloved by the drug companies for being a good cash cow, and doctors follow along because of the amount of research apparently backing up big pharma claims. Good Evidence based medicine – ?
The latest edition of Private Eye ((No 1501. 26th July 2019)) has its regular column ‘Medicine Balls’ and this time ‘M.D.’, a.k.a Dr Phil Hammond, has written about Evidence Based medicine.
Research is expensive and big pharma needs successful research to push its products. Alas what commonly happens is the results of the research are given to the company paying, and that company then publishes the results – or makes the results disappear. The original researchers have no say in the published results.
According to the Eye article, the most downloaded paper in the history of the Public Library of Science was written by John IIoannidis (Stanford University) in 2005 and is called ‘Why Most Published Research Findings Are False’. And the Eye article goes into depressing detail about how this research into the efficacy of Statins (and also anti-depressants, particularly for the mildly depressed) is made ready for publication.
In recent times, efforts are being made to make research more transparent and for unfavourable results to be published properly rather than massaged or ‘lost’. And I really hope this works.
But I’m going to quote the final paragraph of the piece:
The problem with statins is that most of the trials that show they work predated this era of transparency and remain hidden. The Oxford Cholesterol Treatment Trialists Collaboration is the major source of data used by Nice ((NICE: the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence)) , but won’t release all the data. Oh, and it also has commercial arrangements with pharmaceutical companies.
As the saying goes, follow the money. Kerching!