It has become increasingly difficult to publish articles in medical journals that are critical of drugs or the drug industry, or that expose fraud and other wrongdoing committed by doctors. It is also difficult to publish articles documenting that the status quo in a medical specialty is harmful for the patients even though such articles…
On 22 May 2020, preliminary data from a placebo-controlled randomised trial of remdesivir in 1063 patients hospitalized with Covid-19 with lower respiratory tract involvement was published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). There was a lot of enthusiasm and governments in many countries immediately declared that they would make remdesivir available. I shall…
Peter Gøtzsche and Anders Sørensen on trying to get a review of methods for safe antidepressant withdrawal published in Cochrane: “They sent us on a mission that was impossible to accomplish” to “protect the psychiatric guild.” About half of the patients on depression pills, or over 50 million people worldwide, will experience withdrawal symptoms when…
“We live in the era of evidenced-based practice. If an approach is not funded, then it will never acquire the kind of data that would allow it to be considered evidence-based. This creates a closed loop: only research that is hypothesized to be of value is funded; understudied approaches that might be of value are…
It is a serious offence to fabricate and publish defamatory lies about a colleague in a medical journal and even worse when the journal and the publisher cover this up. I discuss here my futile attempts to get the truth out and to rebut a mendacious essay published by Oxford professor Trisha Greenhalgh and three…
Yet again, two US drug companies are trying to reintroduce secrecy. Merck and PTC Therapeutics have appealed an initial ruling that clinical study reports should not be considered confidential. On 11 September, Advocate General of the European Court of Justice, Gerard Hogan, found that disclosure of the documents would harm the companies’ commercial interests. The…
… it was because Professor Gøtzsche was prepared to call out the lowering of scientific standards in Cochrane that the hierarchy felt compelled to plot his demise … one of the worst show trials ever … in a manner that mirrors how the drug industry operates … the death of Cochrane rather than the whistleblower.…
By Maryanne Demasi, Ph.D. August 19, 2019. Science is facing a crisis of democracy. Now more than ever, vitriolic attacks are being leveled at people who debate opposing scientific views. Asking questions that challenge the establishment may be unsettling, but silencing debate and proclaiming that the “science is settled” is not the solution. Belgian physician…
Sponsored by the Uppsala Monitoring Centre and co-arranged by the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine in Oxford, 34 invited people participated in a three-day workshop, “Improving the detection, analysis and reporting of harms in medicines: exploring, enhancing and empowering.” It has been shown in several independent studies that prescription drugs are the third leading cause of…
Peter Gøtzsche, who was expelled from the Cochrane Collaboration last year, plans to found a new Institute for Scientific Freedom. The new organisation, whose goal is “to preverve honesty and integrity in science”, will be launched on 9 March at an international symposium in Copenhagen. Read more.
