Wonder Drugs That Can Kill

July 19, 2008

This was published in Discovery on June 20,2008. It is one of the BEST

articles I have read on how drugs can kill.

Modern pharmaceutical " breakthroughs " sometimes do more harm than good.

Such limitations in a study's design can escape detection even by top

peer reviewers and medical editors. Marcia Angell, the former editor-in-

chief of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), says that most

doctors are ill equipped to critically assess the conclusions of

researchers. A trim woman with a warm smile, Angell leans forward in

her seat at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and says, " Let me

tell you the dirty secret of medical journals: It is very hard to find

enough articles to publish. With a rejection rate of 90 percent for

original research, we were hard pressed to find 10 percent that were

worth publishing. So you end up publishing weak studies because there

is so much bad work out there. " Doctors, Angell says, are not skeptical

enough about what they read in top journals. " They should say, `I don't

believe this; prove it to me.' "

kill/article_view?b_start:int=0 & -C=

Donna

Recommended Posts