Pharmaceutical companies deliberately mislead doctors into prescribing useless and even harmful meds

via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Writing in the Guardian, Ben Goldacre reveals the shocking truth about the drugs that doctors prescribe: thanks to aggressive manipulation from the pharmaceutical companies and passivity from regulators, doctors often don’t know that the drugs were ineffective (or harmful) in a majority of their clinical trials. That’s because pharma companies set up their trials so that they [have?] the right to terminate ones that look unpromising (or stop them early if they look promising and report on the result partway through as though it reflected the whole trial), and to simply suppress the results of negative trials.

As a result, doctors – even doctors who do their homework and pay close attention to the published trials, examining their methodology carefully – end up prescribing useless (or harmful) medicines. And according to Goldacre, this is true of all doctors in every country, because every country’s regulators allow pharmaceutical companies to cynically manipulate research outcomes to increase their profits.

There's more, lots more, in Cory’s original post – and Cory Doctorow is not the sort of person who uses the word “shocking” lightly. He is also well aware of the problems which might ensue if he has been writing untruths. I have seen nothing to indicate that this is happening!

Just read it. There's so much more. Paroxetine, a drug that was known to be ineffective for treating children, which had a risk of suicide as a side-effect, widely prescribed to children, because GlaxoSmithKline declined to publish its research data after an internal memo stated "It would be commercially unacceptable to include a statement that efficacy had not been demonstrated, as this would undermine the profile of paroxetine."

The drugs don't work: a modern medical scandal

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You Can't Pay Me To Care

via Big Think by Orion Jones: article written by guest writer Kecia Lynn

A study recently published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests a connection between money and the ability of people to infer others’ emotions, and that connection isn’t what you might expect. In two separate experiments, groups of University of California-Santa Barbara students were instructed to watch videos of people discussing a recent experience, and then to guess at what the people were feeling. Those members who were offered a financial reward for guessing correctly actually were less accurate in their results than those who were offered another type of reward or no reward at all.

The findings imply that when money comes into the picture, people tend to focus on their own self-interest rather than that of others. Psychologists Christine Ma-Kellams and Jim Blascovich write: “These findings are particularly compelling given that, in both [experiments], it (literally) paid to be empathically accurate … Despite the fact that correctly inferring the emotional states of others would have resulted in financial gain, individuals who focused on the monetary payoff performed worse relative to those who did not.”

Read it at Pacific Standard (includes a link to The Beatles Money (that’s what I want).

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Oh dear!

This is not a good start.

But it will get better.

And that’s a promise.

Welcome

to what I hope will be a useful resource for friends of The Elephant in the Room.

Unlike the careers information blog that I manage there is no guarantee that any one day will have a specific number of posts – or even any at all.

If readers would send me, by commenting here or via Facebook messaging, links to useful information I would be grateful.

I will be providing a fairly random choice of things that I think useful as I come across them in my reading – news media, journal articles (normally only the abstract, occasionally the full article), other blogs (Community Care produces some interesting stuff), and personal development stuff that I’ve found useful over the last few years for myself (Lifehack is one my favourites – mainly to read, note and then ignore the excellent advice).

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