Bad Science

by Ben Goldacre

This is why drug companies are keen to sponsor patient groups, or to exploit the media for their campaigns, as has been seen recently in the news stories singing the praises of the breast cancer drug Herceptin, or Alzheimer’s drugs of borderline efficacy. These advocacy groups demand vociferously in the media that the companies’ drugs be funded by the NHS. I know people associated with these patient advocacy groups—academics—who have spoken out and tried to change their stance, without success: because in the case of the British Alzheimer’s campaign in particular, it struck many people that the demands were rather one-sided. The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) concluded that it couldn’t justify paying for Alzheimer’s drugs, partly because the evidence for their efficacy was weak, and often looked only at soft, surrogate outcomes. The evidence is indeed weak, because the drug companies have failed to subject their medications to sufficiently rigorous testing on real-world outcomes, rigorous testing that would be much less guaranteed to produce a positive result.