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    Bad Pharma: How Medicine is Broken, And How We Can Fix It
    Unavailable
    Bad Pharma: How Medicine is Broken, And How We Can Fix It
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    Bad Pharma: How Medicine is Broken, And How We Can Fix It
    Ebook535 pages9 hours

    Bad Pharma: How Medicine is Broken, And How We Can Fix It

    By Ben Goldacre

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    ‘Bad Science’ hilariously exposed the tricks that quacks and journalists use to distort science, becoming a 400,000 copy bestseller. Now Ben Goldacre puts the $600bn global pharmaceutical industry under the microscope. What he reveals is a fascinating, terrifying mess.

    Doctors and patients need good scientific evidence to make informed decisions. But instead, companies run bad trials on their own drugs, which distort and exaggerate the benefits by design. When these trials produce unflattering results, the data is simply buried. All of this is perfectly legal. In fact, even government regulators withhold vitally important data from the people who need it most. Doctors and patient groups have stood by too, and failed to protect us. Instead, they take money and favours, in a world so fractured that medics and nurses are now educated by the drugs industry.

    The result: patients are harmed in huge numbers.

    Ben Goldacre is Britain’s finest writer on the science behind medicine, and ‘Bad Pharma’ is the book that finally prompted Parliament to ask why all trial results aren’t made publicly available – this edition has been updated with the latest news from the select committee hearings. Let the witty and indefatigable Goldacre show you how medicine went wrong, and what you can do to mend it.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateSep 25, 2012
    ISBN9780007363643
    Unavailable
    Bad Pharma: How Medicine is Broken, And How We Can Fix It
    Author

    Ben Goldacre

    Ben Goldacre is a doctor and science writer who wrote the 'Bad Science' column in the Guardian from 2003 to 2011. He has made a number of documentaries for BBC Radio 4, and his first book Bad Science reached Number One in the nonfiction charts, has sold over 500,000 copies. . His second bestselling book, Bad Pharma, was published in 2013.

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    Reviews for Bad Pharma

    4/5

    172 ratings14 reviews

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    • 4/5
      You will look at your pills in a different way
    • 4/5
      In Bad Science, Ben Goldacre presented many of the flaws with science literacy in the general public. He introduced the major concepts of medical and scientific information with enlightening real world examples (homeopathy used to treat HIV, the MMR scare, etc.) and a healthy dose of humor. It was a wonderful introduction to the field and I use that book as a text book for my introduction to health information class. I had high hopes for Bad Pharma. This book is far more of a jeremiad. I think every point he made needed to be made and I share his ire. But the style I enjoyed so much in his first book was completely absent in his second. I felt like I was being scolded instead of informed, which made this a much more arduous book to complete. I would still suggest this title to anyone who wants to be involved in public health or health policy.
    • 4/5
      It is possible to be so cynical that nothing that Goldacre describes is in the least surprising, but at the same time to be interested in the mechanism.Goldacre is currently making the problems described in this book is life's work. The book is meant to persuade people: patients, doctors and workers in the pharmaceutical industry, to make changes for the better. He suggests actions that people in all these groups could take. Some suggestions seem hopelessly naive, but perhaps they are included as satire.Goldacre addresses the book to a lay audience unfamiliar with statistics, using well-chosen analogies to get his point across. He uses identical phrasing throughout the book, to remind those less familiar with statistics, what effect the behavior he is discussing has on the best available knowledge about a particular drug.On a personal note, a near relative of mine nearly died from a adverse reaction to a medication he had been prescribed for bursitis in his elbow. We do not know if previous adverse reactions had been covered up by the industry, or if his reaction made it into the medical literature.
    • 5/5
      This is a very good book, an eye opener for a very corrupted industry, where science marketing is presented as science.
    • 4/5
      Goldacre has a way of making complex science subjects accessible to the wider public. His first book, Bad Science, highlighted the way that the media dealt with reporting science, and in this book he concentrates his ire onto the $600 billion global pharmacy industry, now dominated by a handful of behemoths.

      And what he reveals is frankly terrifying. He details the way that the industry hides a large majority of the trial data, the way that the legislation requiring data to be published is ignored by companies, and in the EU it is still secret in some cases. There is loads of detail on the way that the data is cherry picked to demonstrate that a particular drug is so much better than the competition. There is lots of detail on the appalling way that the industry is regulated, even though it is very heavily regulated, most of it is ineffective and not enforced, and where the regulation could be improved to help patients and save lives these are not enforced or are not enacted on after lobbying from the industry.

      The biggest chapter though is on the marketing that these companies employ. Their budgets for marketing are normally twice the R&D budgets, which gives you some idea of where their priorities lie. He explains how they sponsor various ‘conferences’ and provided sweeteners to medical professionals at all levels, from lunches to flights to what most people would consider bribes. The nefarious dealings of the drugs rep are dealt with too, from the pressure that they put onto doctors to use their medicines and the way that they collect data directly from surgeries and pharmacies. A lot of academic papers are ghost written, and a leading figure puts their name to it, shocking really.

      There is some details on NICE, but not a huge amount. He looks at the way that they select the drugs for use in treatment, noting that even they do not have access to all the trail data for each medicine that they consider.

      He also writes about how a lot of the drug companies fund patient groups either overtly with cash donations or covertly by funding particular conferences and so on. They have been proven to use them to exert pressure on national agencies (FDA and NICE) to supply the latest drugs regardless of the cost; i.e. £50K spent with a group means that they get their £21k per patient drug treatment approved, even though the trial evidence is not there or is at best not proven to be any more effective than the current items on the market. A real scandal.

      Throughout the book he does give suggestions on how the situation can be improved but he does realise that they is an endemic problem and powerful vested interests do hold sway. Even just enforcing the current rules would make a difference, but it seems unlikely at the moment.

      The phrase for illegal drugs used to be: Just Say No. Perhaps it should apply to legal drugs too...
    • 4/5
      Ben Goldacre is a very angry man, with good reason. In this book he lays out how the pharmaceutical industry has distorted drug research in pursuit of profit, sometimes intentionally, sometimes entirely without malice but with equally devastating effects for patient welfare. This matters because patients are prescribed less effective drugs, or drugs which are outright harmful, at huge financial expense to those paying for the drugs. This isn’t a conspiracy theory book; Goldacre is quite clear that many valuable drugs have come out of the industry, and that most of the people who work in it want to make better drugs. He sets out in detail how and why bias is introduced into both research and prescribing practices, putting it in layman’s terms but linking to the research papers and court documents that back up what he’s saying. He also addresses the failings of the current regulatory system, and proposes ways to improve things — pointing out that unless real controls with serious financial penalties are put in place, even those companies which genuinely want to reform will be under commercial pressure to continue with bad practice in a race to the bottom.It’s a dense and at times exhausting read. But Goldacre has done a decent job of making the issue accessible to a wide audience with a direct interest, from patients to practising doctors and academics. You can skim a lot of the book to get the general gist, or you can read it in details without following the links, or you can dig into research material he drew on and has laid out in meticulous footnotes and citations. He concludes the original edition with practical suggestions about what individual people can do to improve things, often simply by asking questions.I read the second edition, which has a “what happened next” chapter about the reaction to the first edition. As he had predicted, there was a backlash in an attempt to discredit him — but there was also a lot of covert feedback from industry personnel acknowledging the problems and considering how to improve things. While there’s always a “the lurkers support me in email” issue with uncredited sources, he does also offer some examples of companies which have publicly moved to improve transparency.Bad Pharma is an angry but rational examination of a real problem that affects millions of people, including almost anyone reading this review. It’s a worthwhile read, even if it makes for uncomfortable reading for patients, doctors and companies alike.
    • 4/5
      We don't regulate our drugs and the drug companies enough and insist on ensuring that data about the edges of results, I begin to wonder if the drug companies had previous seen the side-effects I suffered with a blood pressure medication and if I could have avoided hundreds of euro in specialist fees in discovering this MYSELF!Interesting look at how drug companies present their goods and how the love of money is indeed the root of many evils. How bias can creep in with doctors and cause them to favour one drug company over another and prescribe their drugs and how this can, often inadvertently, cause harm. There is also a touch of a discussion of overmedicalisation of normal, where drug companies are encouraging doctors to have people on medication, even if they don't really need it. It's a conversation we need to have. Though there also needs to be more testing on the filler in drugs, particularly on generics.
    • 4/5
      Ben has alot of good points and appears well researched. It seems a bit alarmist but probably appropriately so. It is an unfortunate state of affairs. Ben also provides suggestions on how to help fix the situation. I recommend the book.
    • 4/5
      Not quite as much fun as "Bad Science" being very much more serious and more concerned to build an irrefutable case against the pharma industry and its corruption of medicine. Also while one can laugh at quacks and phoneys this is much closer to home. He argues that there is built in distortion in the way medicine is pushed through the system, evidence is subtly distorted, selective results are given wide publicity so that scientific evidence-based medicine is deeply compromised. So costs are greater than they need be, side effects are suffered which could be avoided, continuous improvement is blocked.
    • 5/5
      Everyone should read this book. Boldacre shows how trials for drugs and their perceived usefulness can be manipulated - unpublished data and outright data suppression, trials stopped early, trials extended, ghost written journal articles, etc. How doctors are influenced by the drug industry, beginning in medical school and continuing throughout their practice.

      Goldacre is himself a practicing physician and this book stems in part from his outrage at having prescribed medications when he thought were safe and effective after reviewing the available published data, only to find that in some cases the drugs were not only ineffective, but worse that nothing.
    • 4/5
      I already knew that the pharmaceutical system was greatly flawed, but Goldacre puts a useful focus to the issues. Enjoyed his Britishisms.
    • 4/5
      A very thorough but depressing look at the state of modern medicine and the pharmaceutical industry. More technical than his previous book Bad Science, Ben Goldacre makes a difficult subject accessible to a general audience. Looking at issues from drug licensing, to research into existing treatments, to publication bias and drugs marketing. This truly is a global business and as such we get examples from around the world, focussing specifically on the UK and USA. There are suggestions for improvements and issues to campaign on in all areas. Looses one star for being a little bit repetitive.
    • 4/5
      As with Goldacre's previous book, Bad Science, Bad Pharma is a critical review, but now where he scrutinizes Big Pharma and other parts of the medical industrial complex. His exposé is perhaps not that original, but his overview is fine and his suggestions for improvements worth considering for policy makers and others in the medical industrial complex. A bought this book and then ran into Peter Gøtzsche's book "Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime" in its Danish incarnation, and must say I switched to Gøtzsche's book and completed that before continuing with Goldacre's. I found more bite in Gøtzsche's book (he compares the drug industry with the mafia!) and he has the advantage of doing original research in the field, while Goldacre's contribution to the medical literature has been more discussive, - as far as I can determine. But Gøtzsche's and Goldacre's books support each other well in addressing problems with the drug regulation: We are not dealing with a single author which sees problems. We may also take they differences in suggested solutions as a indication that there may be no one simple solution, e.g., should we let the state make clinical trials or would that make a considerable burden on taxpayers? It may relieve the pharmaceutical industry of expensive trials and let the society - perhaps - get more unbiased results.
    • 5/5
      Bad Pharma is actually a fairly scary book to pick up when you’ve just collected a prescription from the chemist but I’d heard a lot about Bad Science (which I’ve since read) and thought Bad Pharma would be incredibly interesting. I certainly wasn’t wrong.This is pretty much a damaging expose of the pharmaceutical industry’s involvement in modern medicine. Not necessarily their manufacture and distribution of tablets that do improve people’s lives every day but more the unnecessary peddling of drugs that either do very little or are no more effective than drugs already on the market. We’ve all seen the washing powder ads for something ‘new and improved’, only to find out two months later that it’s got one slight miniscule change. How ludicrous would it be if the drug companies did something similar and then got it under patent for 10 years so they could charge incredibly high prices for it? Well, they do.Delving into issues such as pricing, drug trials, suppression of research and trial reports, Goldacre uncovers how strong the hold over our medication is and calls for changes across the board, citing things that patients, doctors, governments, researchers and the drug companies can do.I’m sure Goldacre didn’t make any drug rep friends via this book – and I’m quite sure he doesn’t care. It’s refreshing to read something that is so focussed on what’s right, regardless of the waves it makes. That said, having now gone back and read Bad Science, it’s not really a surprise. This is an absolutely fascinating read for anyone who has had any involvement with our health system or ever taken any medication whatsoever. So, that’s pretty much everyone!