It goes without saying that the drugs you take for a headache, or high blood pressure, or even depression should work better than a Tic-Tac. That's what drug trials are for: researchers give a group of subjects either the drug under investigation or a placebo to check that the medicine is significantly more effective than a sugar pill. Plus, the trials can reveal any potentially harmful side effects. In theory, this is a great way to weed out useless or actively harmful drugs. But it fails when drug manufacturers cherry-pick their data, publishing papers on the positive trials and sweeping the unsuccessful ones under the rug
. And this behavior is completely legal. Science writer and medical doctor Ben Goldacre wrote a book
, with a long excerpt published at the
about how this process leads to approval for drugs that don't actually work. And as he explains, when ...
