Health Care’s Trick Coin
THE NEW YORK TIME
By BEN GOLDACRE
Published: February 1, 2013
THIS month, Johnson & Johnson is facing more than 10,000 lawsuitsover an artificial hip that has been recalled because of a 40 percent failure rate within five years. Mistakes happen in medicine, but internal documents showed that executives had known of flaws with the device for some time, but had failed to make them public.
It would be nice to imagine that this kind of behavior is exceptional, but in reality, the entire evidence base for medicine has been undermined by a casual lack of transparency. Sometimes this is through a failure to report concerns raised by doctors and internal analyses, as was the case with Johnson & Johnson. More commonly, it involves the suppression of clinical trial results, especially when they show a drug is no good. These problems would be bad enough on their own, but they are compounded by a generation of “fake fixes” that have delivered false reassurance, and so prevent realistic public discussion.
more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/opinion/health-cares-trick-coin.html?_r=0
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