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Drug Company Employee: Don't Believe Our Studies

Anonymous author in medical journal warns of bogus research

By John Johnson,  Newser Staff

Posted Jun 13, 2012 12:50 PM CDT

(Newser) – Bear this in mind the next time a drug company touts a serious study proclaiming the wonders of its product: A former employee of a "major" pharmaceutical company has written an essay in the British Medical Journal warning that the industry's scientific-sounding studies are sometimes rigged. “We occasionally resorted to ‘playing’ with the data that had originally failed to show the expected result,” he writes in the subscription-only essay. “This was done by altering the statistical method until any statistical significance was found.”

As Nature explains, the writer is referring to studies that get done after FDA approval, "research" that is subject to far less scrutiny. The companies pay doctors to enroll patients in studies, then massage the results until they're tailor-made for a commercial. The studies are "not designed to determine the overall risk:benefit balance of the drug in the general population," writes the anonymous whistle-blower. "They were designed to support and disseminate a marketing message."

  (Shutterstock)
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COMMENTS
Showing 3 of 39 comments
gzuckier
Jun 16, 2012 12:44 AM CDT
There's two things happening here. On the one hand, the guy complains that they are hiding data that shows their drug in a bad light, and so on; this is definitely a bad thing. On the other hand, he complains that “This was done by altering the statistical method until any statistical significance was found.” This is normal, and in no way misleading; it's like arguing that somebody is doing something wrong by using a magnifying glass to see bacteria not visible to the naked eye in a blood sample. If what you're looking for isn't there, no amount of magnification is going to find it.  Despite the common beliefs that you can make the numbers say anything with statistics, you can't; the techniques acceptable to the DEA are all provably mathematically valid. Using a more sensitive technique to prove something is better is not at all the same thing as choosing a cherry-picked dataset to prove your point. One is looking more closely at the data; the other is adjusting the data to come out how you want it.  The fact that he would say something like that makes me wonder what his position was; nobody who knows anything about how pharmaceutical statisticians work, good or bad, would say anything like that particular sentence. They might blow the whistle at length about cherry picking data and burying bad studies and so on, but they'd never bring up "altering the statistical method" as some kind of fraud.
Redtopp
Jun 15, 2012 2:09 PM CDT
...and the news here is what exactly? 
Derni
Jun 14, 2012 9:15 AM CDT
Americans have learned many things..Don't trust DC///Don't trust people with Strong affiliation to a religious right group or church..Don't trust the top .9% since they're all about profit and will do anything to make MONEY..as well as lie about a product..This country is on the way down the tubes..Rome is burning..sound too dramatic..don't go anywhere..it's going to happen unless people take back what DC and Wall St and the Major corporations have taken from them

 
drug companies • studies • pharmaceutical industry

 
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