Drug companies have a year to publish their data, or we’ll do it for them
By Dr. Tom Jefferson

As a doctor it’s my job to prescribe lotions and potions. To do so, I read information about drug trials in books and medical journals to keep me up to speed on the latest drugs, dangers and side effects.
But what if what I read is part of an elaborate marketing strategy by a drug company to use me to get to you?
…the saturation of scientific literature with commercial messages has come to the point where some of those of us who work full time in this area don’t trust the literature anymore. I can read something about a drug and find that the majority of the data about it – for example as I argued in a recent article on Tamiflu – is missing.

This is not because the work hasn’t been done, but because it has been deliberately hidden. What has been published might have important discrepancies with what probably really happened during a clinical trial. We just don’t know.
It involves everyone: scientists, pharmaceutical sponsors, editors of biomedical journals and the media. Ultimately it is you who suffers.
At school, if you made a mistake the teacher would ask you to explain it and get you to correct it in your exercise book. The same should go for unpublished and misreported trials. They should be published and formally corrected to ensure doctors and patients can rely on complete and accurate information about the treatments we use.

…we have obtained possession of hundreds of highly detailed reports of trials which were never published (invisible) or distorted in the way the results were presented. Some were even ghost written and we also know by whom and for how much money.

… we ask drug companies to publish and correct all data – including on medicines already in circulation – within the next year. Otherwise independent scientists will begin doing it themselves.
Volunteer researchers – currently being signed up – will be able to pick an invisible or distorted trial, write to the drug’s sponsor and ask them to make it visible or correct the record – and drug companies will be given a year to do it.

If the company doesn’t respond within 30 days or turns the offer down, we will publish the paper….

In the Middle Ages scientists were kept under control by physical threats, today control is exerted on what information we’re able to see.