Negative data on drugs suppressed

These days, psychotropic drugs are considered the answer to everything. What's 2 plus 2? Psychotropic drugs. What's the capital of Arizona? Psychotropic drugs.

But now it turns out that the effectiveness of many widely prescribed antidepressants like Prozac, Effexor, and Zoloft has been played up by the publication of favorable studies - while bad results are swept under the rug. By the Far Right, of course.

Because of this, doctors and patients start believing the drugs work much better than they really do. And the drug makers' bloated coffers make even more dough off of the American public, thanks to the drugs being overprescribed.

With some of the drugs, a majority of the studies failed to reveal a good result - yet only the few studies that showed a good result were ever published. And anyone who's been paying attention knows the whole process is stacked in favor of the drugs in the first place - and still there were plenty of studies with bad results.

The breakdown goes like this: 97% of the studies with positive outcomes were published; only 39% of those with negative outcomes were. And almost all of the negative reports that were published were distorted to make them appear positive!

Even the Wall Street Journal says the practice of suppressing bad reports is the same thing Big Tobacco did when studies showed nicotine is addictive. That the drug racket suppressed unfavorable data on antidepressants isn't even new: The state of New York sued GlaxoSmithKline in 2004 for covering up negative results about Paxil.

If they're doing what the tobacco industry did, then there ought to be nationwide legal action as big as what Big Tobacco was slapped with in the '90s. To see Big Medicine slapped silly for its greed would be too sweet for words.

(Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120051950205895415.html)