The "over-hyping" of drug treatment benefits and denial of their hazards by pharmaceutical companies is contributing to a crisis in health care, Welsh-based psychiatrist Prof David Healy warned yesterday.
Prof Healy, who is a professor of psychiatry at Cardiff University, is visiting Dunedin as a guest of the University of Otago Bioethics Centre.
He yesterday gave a 1pm seminar, attended by about 40 people, on evidence-based medicine and later gave a public lecture on "It's time to tell your doctor you're not an anecdote".
Prof Healy said he was "a fairly orthodox doctor" but was concerned the results of many clinical drug trials were not being published because pharmaceutical firms viewed them as unfavourable.
"Structural factors" in the international health care system had "tied the survival" of such companies to the development of "blockbuster drugs" so they must "over-hype the benefits and deny their hazards".
This "hyping and hiding" hinged on "manipulations of trial data", and in some cases there was "outright concealment" of deaths and the "tendentious use of statistics".
He was also concerned about extensive use of "ghostwriting" in academic publications.
Even the well-known medical experts named as authors of some drug trial papers had earlier been given "ghostwritten" results and had not received the full data generated by clinical trials.
The cost of medical care was continuing to rise sharply, and some older drugs which were now less profitable but actually worked better were being replaced by costlier drugs.
In recent years, increasing emphasis had been put on the drug-related findings of randomised clinical trials.
And, since the mid-1990s, the term "anecdotal" - used to describe the experiences and symptoms of individual patients, and their doctors' observations of them - had tended to be used in a negative way, he said in an interview.
But, in fact, one significant study had shown that the so-called "anecdotal" findings of doctors involving adverse drug side effects, proved accurate about 80% of the time.
The origins of some of these problems could be traced back to the 1962 thalidomide crisis and the efforts that were made to prevent its recurrence, including the requirement that drug treatments be demonstrated by means of randomised controlled trials, he said.
