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Drug Companies Sponsorship of Research Proves Dangerous

The October 2002 issue of the British journal The Lancet published the first segment of a four-part study concerning the role of the pharmaceutical industry in medicine. The article expresses concern over how dangerous it can be when the majority of disease care research is drug company-sponsored. Drug companies have become the largest sponsors of medical research.

Of particular concern was how drug companies release information on the drugs they produce. The authors note, for example, that when a product is doing well, there is no shortage of information released to the public. When a drug gives evidence of being dangerous, however, the companies tend to skew or outright withhold the release of information so as to put their product in the most favorable light.

The authors say that “trials with negative results tend to be published much later than those with more positive conclusions.”

They go on to say they are not sure why “conclusions of trials sponsored by drug companies, rather than by other sources, tend to be more favorable to the sponsor’s product.”

“Moreover,” they continue, “as increasing numbers of medical researchers are drawn to the industry, alternative voices and opinions can become muted, and novel avenues of research might be overlooked.” They worry that this control of research may steer disease care policymakers away from “tried, familiar and usually cheaper approaches, to novel, unfamiliar, and generally more expensive alternatives that offer no real clinical advantage.”

Commentary: Whenever research, any research, is only conducted by its own industry, the consumer is put in danger by being left out of the information loop. Witness carmakers that learn of exploding gas tanks or tobacco companies that learn of the dangers of cigarettes and suppress the information. What makes us think that drug companies would be any different? Many industries, including the drug industry, when faced with the possibility of product liability, will do a cost analysis of what a certain number of liability cases will cost them versus actually fixing the problem. If you do not have the proper information to determine the truth, how can you be sure that they even considered patient safety?

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