Ever wonder why so many drugs come out of studies with flying colors?
It’s because the researchers stack the deck in favor of the meds… and a new study shows just how quick and easy it is to get the results you want. The secret? Don’t compare the drug to anything else, and don’t even bother looking at safety.
But what’d you expect? Big Pharma foots the bill for most of these things, and they expect to get something for their money.
And they’re getting it, alright. Because as it turns out, more than two-thirds of studies on existing drugs published in the six "top" medical journals never bother to compare the med to another treatment.
Makes you wonder how those journals got to the "top" — and what kind of dung is on the bottom of that heap.
An eye-popping review in the Journal of the American Medical Association (yes, one of those "top" journals) looked at 328 drug evaluation studies of existing meds published between June 2008 and September 2009. Just 104 of them actually met the definition of "comparative effectiveness research."
Those three little words should be the backbone of any drug study — it simply means that the researchers are comparing the drug in question to another drug or treatment. Yet just 32 percent of those studies bothered with it.
And just 11 percent of those studies compared the drug to a nondrug treatment
— which should tell you why alternatives never come out ahead. They’re never in the studies!
Meanwhile, if you thought no one was looking out for your safety — you’re absolutely right. Less than 20 percent of those studies considered drug safety.
No wonder so many bad meds make it through the system.
Here’s my first and only rule of drug studies: Don’t believe anything you read, unless you read it here.
Researching the researchers,