What’s truly extraordinary is that almost all these problems—the suppression of negative results, data dredging, hiding unhelpful data, and more—could largely be solved with one very simple intervention that would cost almost nothing: a clinical trials register, public, open, and properly enforced. This is how it would work. You’re a drug company. Before you even start your study, you publish the protocol for it, the methods section of the paper, somewhere public. This means that everyone can see what you’re going to do in your trial, what you’re going to measure, how, in how many people, and
...more