Health: Fertilizing the Roots of Mistrust & Conspiracy

“Half of registered clinical trials fail to publish their results, and studies with negative or non-significant results are twice as likely to be unpublished”, CBC story.

Intellectual dishonesty coupled with corporate backers = conspiracy.

I know … my point is a touch hyperbolic, but I can’t help but come to this when I read stuff like this via the CBC.

Every year, thousands of Canadians sign up to participate in clinical trials, offering their bodies to further the development of important medical advances like new drugs or devices. But the results of many of those trials never see the light of day.

A new online tool aims to put pressure on some of the companies and institutions behind the problem. TrialsTracker maintains a list of all the trials registered on the world’s leading clinical trials database and tracks how many of them are updated with results.

Amid pharmaceutical companies and research bodies from around the world on ClinicalTrials.gov, maintained by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, nine Canadian universities and institutions rank in the top 100 organizations with the greatest proportion of registered trials without results.

How am I – a relative simpleton in the vast machinery of pharmaceuticals, corporate donors, universities that look the other way, political corruption and a health care system that is neither about ‘health’ nor ‘care’ – supposed to believe anything I’m told when I read a gut-wrenching quote like this:

The University of Toronto’s David Henry says “publication bias,” as it’s called, is robbing the medical community and patients of important information.

“We’ve been deceived about the truth about treatments that we’ve used widely over a long period, in very large numbers of individuals, because of the selective publication of results that are favourable to the product,” says Henry, a professor of health systems data at U of T’s Institute for Health Policy Management and Evaluation.

I’ve fought off the vacci-nazis when it comes to my kid and my own health for more than a decade. This article vindicates the years of bullying and mental abuse that the medical and media communities have hurled at me.  I feel vindicated when I read that “approximately half of registered clinical trials fail to publish their results, and studies with negative or non-significant results are twice as likely to be unpublished”.

Don’t get me wrong:  I BELIEVE IN SCIENCE.  I DON’T believe in junk, corporate science that’s winds up doing more damage than good just so that the bottom line and a few top-level bonuses can be protected.

If the health industry is going to get people on board and win the trust of the public, it MUST be mandatory for anyone doing these clinical trials to make the results public, even if they work against the intent of the research being done.

This is science.  Failure to do so puts the public at risk.