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Prof David Healy, of Cardiff University, Wales, urges the release of more data showing the clinical effects of medical drugs. Photo by Linda Robertson. |
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.
john.gibb@odt.co.nz
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