The legal ‘drugs’ we take today, both over-the-counter and prescription medication, are responsible for at least 100,000 deaths per year in the United States alone. As many reports have indicated, most of the published research supporting these drugs is completely false; results are manipulated in order to get products onto the market as quickly as possible, rather than to ensure their safety.
This kind of corruption in rampant in the industry and poses a significant risk to public health and safety. A recent study published last week in The British Medical Journal by researchers at the Nordic Cochrane Center in Copenhagen, for example, determined that pharmaceutical companies were not disclosing all information regarding the results of their drug trials. You can read more about that here.
We are now more than a decade past when the most widely accessed article in the history of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) was published — a scathing review of medical fraud — and the problem has only worsened. Medical professionals still risk their jobs and reputations to get the message out there and educate the public. Dr. Richard Horton, the current Editor-In-Chief of The Lancet, is just one prominent example:
The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. (source)
