Читать книгу Bad Pharma: How Medicine is Broken, And How We Can Fix It - Ben Goldacre - Страница 16

So far we’ve established that ethics committees, universities and the professional bodies of medical researchers have all failed to protect patients from publication bias, even though the selective non-publication of unflattering data is a serious issue for medicine. We know that it distorts and undermines every decision that researchers, doctors and patients make, and that it exposes patients to avoidable suffering and death. This is not seriously disputed, so you might reasonably imagine that governments, regulators and medical journals must all have tried to address it.

They have tried, and failed. Worse than simply failing, they have repeatedly provided what we might regard as ‘fake fixes’: we have seen small changes in regulations and practices, announced with great fanfare, but then either ignored or bypassed. This has given false reassurance to doctors, academics and the public that the problem has been fixed. What follows is the story of these fake fixes.