Bad pharma

how drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients

by Ben Goldacre

426 pages

English language

Published Nov. 7, 2013 by Faber and Faber.

ISBN:: 978-0-86547-800-8
OCLC Number:: 814389713

(9 reviews)

We like to imagine that medicine is based on evidence and the results of fair tests. In reality, those tests are often profoundly flawed. We like to imagine that doctors are familiar with the research literature about a drug, when in reality much of the research is hidden from them by drug companies. We like to imagine that doctors are impartially educated, when in reality much of their education is funded by the pharmaceutical industry. We like to imagine that regulators let only effective drugs onto the market, when in reality they approve useless drugs, with data on side effects casually withheld from doctors and patients. All these problems have been shielded from public scrutiny because they're too complex to capture in a sound bite. But Ben Goldacre shows that the true scale of this murderous disaster fully reveals itself only when the details are untangled. He believes we should …

7 editions

Bastian Greshake Tzovaras reviewed Bad pharma by Ben Goldacre

Review of 'Bad pharma' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Okay, somehow Goodreads didn't save the last review I tried to write. So I'll try again:

If I only had read this book a day earlier I could have flagged it as the most depressing read of 2012. It made me cry out loud and swear a lot (just ask my girlfriend who had to listen to it for the most time).

Bad Pharma gives a great overview on how medicine is failing patients (aka each of us) all the time. Publication bias, missing access to raw data and all the other nuisances which might be familiar to you from other fields of science also apply to medicine. The only catch being: In medicine this lack of knowledge, often facilitated by lacking access to data, is killing people, virtually every day.

We don't know how drugs compare to each other, serious side effects are not as well known as they should be, organisations which approve drugs feel it's their job to protect pharmaceutical companies and MDs get most (if not all) of their post-graduation training delivered from drug companies. Are you already feeling depressed?

Goldacre does a great job of describing all those broken parts, even if you're not too familiar with the health system in the UK or the EU. And he makes clear: It's not that our medicine is controlled by mind-bending lizard-alien-conspiracies but that it's simply an effect of a system full of idiosyncrasies and normal people, with all their failures. His british humour often saves you from more serious depressions and he helpfully gives lots of ideas how the system could be fixed.