… of a book about misleading health statistics.
Another problem — increasingly — is conflict of interest. As pharmaceutical companies fund more of their own trials, the studies may be designed to yield the sunniest results possible. Allowing a new drug to shadow-box against a placebo, for instance, promises more marketable results than pitting it against a competing drug that’s already on the market. Publicizing only surrogate outcomes without mentioning whether the patient benefits in any substantive way is another common drug company dodge. So is burying — or at least minimizing — side effects or other shortcomings…