Pharmaceuticals: tricks of the trade

I’m sure many readers of BioethicsBytes are already familiar with the TED Talks phenomenon but, as far as I’m aware this is the first time we’ve directly recommended one of their videos on this site. TED events, and later online videos, involve invited participants in giving “the talk of their lives” in 18 minutes or less. The result is a collection of pithy and thought-provoking presentations on a variety of topics.

Ben Goldacre shines a spotlight on poor and dangerous practice in the pharmaceutical industry

Ben Goldacre is a medically-qualified writer who has devoted much of his time drawing the public’s attention to examples of pseudoscience and inappropriate uses of science, originally via his regular Bad Science column in the Guardian newspaper and later in his first book, of the same name (see here for a review of the book Bad Science).

In 2012, Goldacre has turned his penetrating gaze on the pharmaceutical industry and the results, now available in his second book Bad Pharma, have brought to a wider audience concerns about the ‘tricks’ that are played by drug companies to make their products seem more successful than is warranted.