Drug trials conducted by the very pharmaceutical company with an obvious vested interest in a positive result are far more likely to yield a... positive result!

Perhaps not earth-shattering news to anybody with a gram of cynicism in their body but is still an orchestrated effort to undermine the credibility of science as anything higher than the distortion of data in the name of money.

All the double-blind protocols in the world cannot reveal whether raw data and published data have anything in common save for both being in base 10. Revealingly, both the drug companies' internal trials and those supposedly external trials that were actually conducted by scientists in corporate bondage yielded a positive outcome in 85% of cases. This compares with a success rate of 50-60% from trials that are seemingly free from corrupting influences.

With much of the science community ablog about how some sugar-laden carbonated fizz could corrupt your sense of healthy well-being, it is good to be reminded that your friendly, smiling, drug-peddling multinational pharmacorps are involved in a more covert and more insidious undermining of scientific integrity. But as everyone in the wheel of deceit is making money, the only real drug trials are those let loose on a public with an ever-shrinking number of alternative options.

Having taken the pin out, Florence Bourgeois, head of the research team, then goes all coy about where to lob the grenade. "While we cannot specifically point to which factors contribute to the association between funding source and positive result reporting, our findings speak to the need for more disclosure of all elements of a study," she says. "Publication bias is likely a contributing factor, but there may be many more, including biases in study design, patient selection, data analysis and results reporting."

So much for evidence-based medicine.



Source:
Drug trials funded by industry are more likely to publish favorable results