Includes bibliographical references and index

Missing data -- Where do new drugs come from? -- Bad regulators -- Bad trials -- Bigger, simpler trials -- Marketing -- Better data

In this book the author puts the $600 billion dollar global pharmaceutical industry under the microscope. What he reveals is a fascinating, terrifying mess. His previous book Bad Science exposed the tricks that quacks and journalists use to distort science. In this follow-up, he points out that doctors and patients need good scientific evidence to make informed decisions. But instead, companies run bad trials on their own drugs, which distort and exaggerate the benefits by design. When these trials produce unflattering results, the data is simply buried. All of this is perfectly legal. In fact, even government regulators withhold vitally important data from the people who need it most. Doctors and patient groups have stood by too, and failed to protect us. Instead, they take money and favours, in a world so fractured that medics and nurses are now educated by the drugs industry. Patients are harmed in huge numbers. The author, a writer on the science behind medicine, here shows exactly how the science has been distorted, how our systems have been broken, and waht is needed to fix them