BAD PHARMA: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients

Ben Goldacre

The $600 billion pharmaceutical industry spends more on marketing than it does on research and development. It distorts and suppresses the results of clinical trials if they are unfavourable. New diseases are invented in order to swell profits. Doctors are kept in the dark about which drugs are the best for their patients. Patients’ pressure groups are covertly sponsored by pill manufacturers. Authoritative-looking journals can be nothing more than disguised advertising brochures. Papers, supposedly by respected academics, are in fact ghostwritten by drugs companies. The offences are countless and the consequences are felt by us all. What we trust to cure us may be utterly ineffectual or actually harmful. Ben Goldacre is Britain’s finest writer on medical matters today and Bad Pharma is a brilliant and savage attack on an industry rife with corruption.

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BAD SCIENCE

Release date: 2nd Apr 2009

Author: Ben Goldacre

Ben Goldacre’s wise and witty bestseller, shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, lifts the lid on quack doctors, flaky statistics, scaremongering journalists and evil pharmaceutical corporations.