This article explains the new British Medical Journal study demonstrating the extent to which drug companies are able to suppress negative studies about their products, while allowing positive studies to be published. Shockingly and illegally, this even includes federally funded research.
Drug research, even from clinical trials sponsored by the federal government, routinely is suppressed, harming patients and increasing health care costs, according to new data highlighting an ethical controversy that continues to plague the field of medicine.
“The current situation is a disservice to research participants, patients, health systems and the whole endeavor of clinical medicine,” according to an editorial accompanying the papers published in the British Medical Journal.
Turning up the heat, the journal, in an editorial, posed a remedy that is likely to get the attention of doctors who take part in clinical trial research.
“Concealment of data should be regarded as the serious ethical breach that it is, and clinical researchers who fail to disclose data should be subject to disciplinary action by professional organizations,” wrote Richard Lehman of the University of Oxford, and Elizabeth Loder, a BMJ editor.
The BMJ papers are the latest thunderbolts in a gathering storm that has swirled around medicine in recent years. The revelations add to the calls for reform in the field.
“It is grossly unethical and an insult to the integrity of medicine when this is allowed to occur and go unpunished,” said orthopedic surgeon Chuck Rosen, president of the Association for Medical Ethics.
