Category Archives: In the research lab

Be suspicious of research presented at scientific meetings

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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I’m not a scientist. I’m merely a dull-witted heart attack survivor who three years ago started asking questions about the fistful of cardiac drugs I now have to take each day.  But I did spend 20 years of my life living with a scientist, which meant countless scintillating breakfast table conversations on topics like zinc and copper sediment in the Fraser River estuary. One thing I did learn from such scintillation is that there’s research – and then there’s research.

Or, as New York Times journalist Andrew C. Revkin, author of Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast, reminds us:

“For every PhD, there is an equal and opposite PhD!”

This may help to explain why we can read in breathlessly urgent news headlines that coffee causes cancer, yet the very next week we’ll read that coffee, in fact, prevents cancer.    . Continue reading →

Battling bad science

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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He’s back… Watch Dr. Ben Goldacre‘s irreverent and brilliant explanation of why those industry-funded miracle cure headlines can be so appallingly wrong – yes, even when the science is done by those with the letters M.D. after their names.

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How did this heart drug get approved in the first place?

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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In case you believe that the medicine you’re taking has been adequately tested on real live patients before being legally approved, you might want to consider new research published this month in The New England Journal of Medicine*. A heart drug called nesiritide that for the past 10 years has been given to acute heart failure patients in hospital has failed to show any improvement compared to placebo.

But the drug had somehow received FDA approval in 2001 for use on these patients – after initial non-approval. Continue reading →

Why Big Pharma now outsources its clinical trials overseas

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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In New Delhi, 49 babies died at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (a public hospital renowned for providing low-cost treatment to the poor) while they were taking part in pharmaceutical clinical trials over a 30-month period. These babies had been given a variety of new drugs being studied to treat conditions like zinc deficiency, high blood pressure or a brain inflammation called chronic focal encephalitis. The head of the pediatrics department at the All India Institute claimed that “none of the deaths was due to the medication or interventions used in clinical trials.”

The blood-pressure drugs had never before been given to anyone under 18. Yet of the children enrolled in these studies, two-thirds of them were infants less than one year old.

As recently as 1990, only 271 drug trials were being conducted in foreign countries on drugs intended for North American use. But by 2008, that number had risen to 6,485—an increase of more than 2,000%.  Continue reading →