What you need to know about life-threatening, medical publication bias

Medical publication bias is the practice of selectively publishing trial results that serve an agenda and represents a major flaw in medicine's scientific basis. Much of the scientific research published in medical journals is bought-and-paid-for by the pharmaceutical industry. Conscious consumers should be aware of this and make a special effort in realizing the following when doing their research:

1. Medical publication bias includes publishing positive results but not the negative ones, not publishing retractions of fraudulent studies, and funding bias. (Click on the photo above to find out more.)

2. Half of all clinical trials ever completed on the medical treatments currently in use have never been published in the medical literature.

3. Clinical trials with positive results for the test treatment are approximately two times as likely to be published. This applies to both academic research and industry studies.

4. In 2010, researchers identified all the published trials for five major classes of drugs, and then measured two key features: Were they positive, and were they funded by industry? Out of a total of 500 trials, 85 percent of the industry-funded studies were positive, compared to 50 percent of the government-funded trials

5. Published studies are used by doctors and health agencies to make recommendations and write prescriptions. When they are given an extremely skewed picture of the facts, they cannot make safe recommendations, and patients die.

6. Drug advertisements can make up about 99 percent of a medical journal’s advertising profit, and allows the pharmaceutical industry to demand favorable product mentions in editorial pieces (which they will sometimes write themselves).

7. The pharmaceutical industry uses many “tricks” to turn otherwise negative studies positive. This includes choosing study participants who are more likely to benefit from the treatment and hiding or simply not publishing negative results.

8. When your doctor prescribes a drug for you, even if he or she has reviewed the relevant published data, there is virtually no way to know whether that medication is truly safe or effective.

To see examples of the above, read the Mercola.com source articles which can be found here:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/02/13/publication-bias.aspx?e_cid=20130213_DNL_art_1&utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20130213

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/02/14/big-pharma-tricks.aspx?e_cid=20130214_DNL_art_2&utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20130214

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