I have recently been trying to plough my way through clinical trial papers about benfotiamine as it's one of the supplements mentioned here a lot. (I have just bought it..) It has been virtually impossible for someone like me (no scientific background), to really know what I'm doing.

Having read Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, I am aware of the bad practice that goes on in the pharmaceutical and nutritional supplement industries so I had a look at the Alltrials site and signed their petition.

www.alltrials.org

To those who haven't heard of it, the aim is to create a database where all clinical trials are registered to ensure transparency.
It came as a big shock to me that half of all trials go unpublished. So for example, there may have been 100 trials into a particular drug, 90 show unfavourable results, 10 are favourable. These are the ones that will get published and the rest get buried. This is unacceptable.

Another good place is The Cochrane Collaboration, a totally unbiased organisation that promotes informed choices for clinicians, practitioners and patients. They have a library with peer reviewed articles etc., but you have to subscribe.

www.cochrane.org

I hope I'm not teaching Granny to suck eggs here, but this is all new to me and I want to be well informed not partially informed by disreputable companies out to make a profit based on questionable reporting and dodgy scientific methods.

Karen
PS Tip when reading magazine articles and journals, particularly when published by a drug/supplement company, go to the bottom of the page and read the small print disclaimers. I recently read a couple by lef.org and at the bottom it
warned that the statements were not endorsed by the food and drugs administration...