Comment on My review of Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre by Duane.
I took a statistics class and the instructor frequently used medical research functions and results to illustrate his points. If I understand correctly what he seemed to say repeatedly was that if a drug company cannot prove at a level of 95% confidence that a drug is effective, it is rejected by FDA rules. If that means that a drug can be effective in 94% of the test patients and still be rejected, it is a pretty big motivation to skew the tests, but in a backwards sense I think that works both for and against some patients and drugs. So I agree completely with where you are heading, but there are two possible sides to this overall issue…
I think it is particularly appalling that non-drug treatments or alternative treatments need to meet the same level of confidence in research trials even though there may be no known negative side effects or other reasons to reject them, thus negating the good effects that might be available to people if the treatment were available and recommended by the medical profession. And associated with this is the whole idea that if some herb that is freely available is actually effective the FDA tries to ban it and get it off the market because it kills the market for less effective but more profitable drugs!! Crooked, in my book…
