I have long told you that when drug companies produce statistics, for the consumption of regulatory agencies or the public, their products look better than the same statistics produced by others, or on trials when the drugs are in the wild.
Partly this is because of the greater care pharmaceuticals take in running their clinical trials. It’s true. They are forced into this vigilance by regulatory agencies. I do not mean the results are therefore more likely to be correct. I mean trials proceed in a more orderly manner, including the writing of the statistics at the end, that the process is better controlled for them than in teams of researchers laboring away in the hope of papers.
Drug companies know how to get wee Ps better than anybody, since it is their business. Regulatory agencies require wee Ps, you see. Alas, wee Ps are proof of nothing. Nothing having to do with whether a drug works, or it causes harm, or is useless, or anything like that. I know I am almost alone in saying this. For now. Maybe after reading this, you will join me.
In the speech I gave to the at Hillsdale (blog/Substack), which included many nervous scientists who met beforehand to plan a strategy of reaction, I remarked, “The British Medical Journal 2017 review of New & Improved cancer drugs found that for only about 35% of new drugs was there an important effect, and that ‘The magnitude of the benefit on overall survival ranged from 1.0 to 5.8 months.’ That’s it. An average of three months.”
In other words, two-thirds of new drugs that waved their wee Ps in the faces of regulators failed when released into the wild. And the ones that succeeded provided a barely there effect.
This is only one of many similar stories of what happens when drugs are out of the hands of manufacturers and put into the hands of the people who you ask if the drugs are right for you. The well known John Ioannidis examined forty nine top medical papers and found: “…7 (16%) were contradicted by subsequent studies, 7 others (16%) had found effects that were stronger than those of subsequent studies, 20 (44%) were replicated, and 11 (24%) remained largely unchallenged.”
Hellbound and Down 