![]() Bad Pharma is written in a data-driven, academic style that eschews personal testimony: great for laying out the raw facts of the situation, but less helpful when it comes to building a picture of the human culture that allowed this mess to develop, in the way that, say, Andrew Sorkin’s superb Too Big to Fail did for the institutions of Wall Street. Tackling that culture is where the book feels less satisfying. This isn’t simply a book about badly behaved corporations, but a dissection of a drug research culture so corrupted that it no longer serves the public it is supposed to protect. “That’s a lot to stand up,” Ben admits, but in 400 pages he does just that, meticulously picking apart not just drug companies, but researchers, regulators, even patient groups. ![]() ![]() Information is routinely concealed from the medical profession and wider public through a combination of bad practice and deliberate deceit. Drug companies use their financial clout to put a stranglehold on the channels through which evidence is passed to the doctors and policy-makers who need to make decisions on treatments. The tools we have to investigate new drugs are woefully misused. ![]() Medicine is broken, as Ben Goldacre explains with laser-sharp clarity in his new book Bad Pharma. Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients by Ben Goldacre (Fourth Estate) ![]()
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