Book Review: Bad Pharma—How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors & Harm Patients

The author of Bad Pharma does an excellent job of shining a light on the truths that the drug industry wants to stay hidden.

Those truths include how they mislead doctors and the medical industry through sales techniques, and manipulate consumers into becoming life-long drug customers. (For doctors, that industry influence begins in medical school and continues throughout their practice.)

We also learn truths about the internal workings of the medical academia, the U.S. FDA, and medical journals publishing.

The arguments in the book are supported by research and data made available to the reader. The author, Ben Goldacre, is a doctor and science journalist, and advocates for sticking to the scientific method, full disclosure and advocating for the interest of the patients. Here are a few highlights from Bad Pharma.

Manipulating Clinical Drug Trials

As consumers, how do we really know which drugs are best? The U.S. FDA protects us, right? Well sort of. Read how trials for drugs and their perceived usefulness can be manipulated, poor trials go unpublished or outright suppressed, and underperforming trials are stopped early or the trial period extended.

One way to manipulate clinical trials starts at the beginning―the design of the trial. Often, few comparison studies are done. Far more common are new drug studies going against placebo pills (that everyone knows don’t work). This helps inflate findings, makes new drugs look more effective than older drugs―because they were never compared against each other.

Bad Pharma & the Cost of Doing Business

Learn how pharmaceutical companies legitimately funnel $10 million to $20 million a year to major medical journals including the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association. So, are we surprised then that studies funded by the pharmaceutical industry are much more likely to get published by these influential journals?

Direct to Consumer Drug Advertising

Did you know drug companies spend twice as much on marketing and advertising as on researching and developing new drugs? (I was shocked.)

Of special interest to me is the ‘Direct to Consumer’ drug advertising which has significantly increased drug sales in the U.S. ‘Direct to Consumer’ drug advertising is so misleading that it is banned in all countries except two: the U.S. and New Zealand. (No wonder that 70% of drug companies’ profit comes from the U.S.)

To be specific, I hate those misleading TV commercials that target A-Fib patients. What these ads for anticoagulants don’t tell you is:

• You are on their meds for life! (they want lifelong customers!)
• These meds do nothing to treat your A-Fib (only your risk of stroke)
• A-Fib can be cured (you don’t have to be on meds for the rest of your life)

These ads for anticoagulant medications imply if you just take their pill once a day, you’ve taken care of your A-Fib. Wrong!

Well Written, Easy to Understand

Bad Pharma, is written in an easy-to-understand manner (you don’t need a medical or science degree). If you wish, you can skim through the book to get an overview, then stop and read a topic of interest. Or you can dig in for a full read, including the authors’s research and other references (documented in footnotes with citations.)

Check on Your Doctor

After reading how big Pharma may be influencing your doctor, you can now find out. In the U.S., with the passing of the Sunshine Act (part of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act), we can now research if a doctor has received pharma money to prescribe their products. Just go to the Open Payments or Dollars for Doctors website.

One of our tenets at A-Fib.com, is ‘Educate Yourself’! If you want to be a more savvy consumer of health care services, I highly recommend Bad Pharma. I also recommend Ben Goldacre’s other book, Bad Science.

Bonus Idea: If you pair this book with “Know Your Chances: Understanding Health Statistics” by Steven Woloshin, you’ll have a complete course on how the drug industry skillfully markets their products.

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