Turns out a full one third of drug studies showed anti-depressants had a negative or questionable effect. Surprisingly, that third were never published! I think there needs to be a law passed here. Or the FDA needs to pass new regulations on how drug tests are published.
While I am NO fan of the pharmaceutical industry, and think that they surpass the congress and the RIAA on the corrupt-fuckwad-o-meter, the fact that some studies didn’t get published is hardly a smoking gun in my view. Even if it were shown that the drug companies were involved in purposefully burying research, I can’t support the idea of further legislation.
1) The academics themselves do a pretty good job of policing journals. Everyone reads the “New England Journal of Medicine.” Why? Because they have high standards, and conform to sound reporting and publishing standards. Does any one read the “Pfizer Journal of Happy Pills,” other than those employed by the Pfizer marketing and publishing departments? No, of course not. Why? Because everyone knows that PJHP is a corporate shill, and horribly biased.
2) Who are we going to get to do the policing? The guys who work at the FDA because they are too incompetent to work for Pfizer, (and already have such a faboo reputation for keeping us safe) or the politicians who are world-renown for their natural incorruptibility?
Well, It wasn’t that some studies didn’t get published, it’s that almost all of the negative studies didn’t get published and all but one of the positive did.
More so, 11 out of 36 negative studies were written as if they were positive. 11 out of 36 is certainly a significant number, and so is 11 out of 74 (the total number of studies).
I don’t think we need better policing of academic journals, I think we need better policing of the FDA, and a central clearing house for doctors to reference for both positive and negative studies.
I’ll agree that it’s probably not an easy problem to fix, but doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.