Post Tagged with: "Cochrane collaboration"

Keep statin supremo away from the missing side-effect data

31 by / on 19 Feb 2015, / in statins

The statin saga – do they help or harm? – took a fascinating new turn on Sunday when statin supremo Professor Sir Rory Collins confessed to the Express that he hadn’t actually done the analysis needed to uncover the true side-effect rate.

If you’ve been following this pharmacological soap, your response when you heard this was probably first amazed laughter, followed by outrage at the breath-taking hypocrisy and then, after a brief reflection, alarm at the implications.

SOS: Sanity over Statins – CTT the house of statin secrets

8 by / on 4 Mar 2014, / in statins

Should a professional body, however eminent, be allowed to keep information about the safety of products they are supplying to public hidden so no one else can run tests on them? (Read more…)

Companies claim drugs’ side effects are commercial secrets

1 by / on 7 Jan 2014, / in evidence based medicine

One of the comforting myths about the powerful drugs used in modern medicine is that they are prescribed on the basis of good scientific evidence. Proper randomised clinical trials, we are regularly assured, compare them with a placebo and the results can tell us which are safe and effective.
However this is an illusion. For nearly thirty years drug experts have known that there was a major flaw in this assumption, which doctors and the agencies set up to regulate drugs have chosen largely to ignore. (Read more…)

Statin trials: exaggerating benefits and ignoring the harm

1 by / on 30 Oct 2013, / in statins

The ‘Cochrane Collaboration’ is an international collective of researchers whose self-proclaimed role is to provide accurate and robust appraisals of health interventions. The group specialises in ‘meta-analyses’: the grouping together of several similar studies on interventions including drug therapies…

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