If you have often suspected that drug studies are rigged by the pharmaceutical manufacturer, you are right. "Drug studies skewed toward study sponsors," reported The Washington Post.(1) "Industry-funded research often favours patent-holders, study finds." Specifically, the American Journal of Psychiatry study authors said, "In 90% of the studies, the reported overall outcome was in favour of the sponsor's drug. On the basis of these contrasting findings in head-to-head trials, it appears that whichever company sponsors the trial produces the better antipsychotic drug."(2)

Marcia Angell, MD, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, agrees. "Is there some way (drug) companies can rig clinical trials to make their drugs look better than they are? Unfortunately, the answer is yes. Trials can be rigged in a dozen ways, and it happens all the time." One "way to load the dice," she writes, "is to enroll only young subjects in trials, even if the drugs being tested are meant to be used mainly in older people. Because young people generally experience fewer side effects, drugs will look safer." Another of the "common ways to bias trials is to present only part of the data - the part that makes the product look good - and ignore the rest." She adds, "The most dramatic form of bias is out-and-out suppression of negative results."(3)

Total drug industry worldwide sales are in excess of $500 billion per year, half of which are in North America. Profit margins are typically 20 per cent, so high that "the combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses put together."

But more cash does not buy more cures. In fact, said the Washington Post: "When the federal government recently compared a broader range of drugs in typical schizophrenia patients in a lengthy trial, the two medications that stood out were cheaper drugs not under patent."(1) It gets even more interesting when we broaden our list of treatment options to include nutrition. With the therapeutic use of vitamin supplements, the cost goes down much further, and the success rate goes way up. Orthomolecular (nutritional) therapy, says psychiatrist Abram Hoffer, MD, PhD, is many times more effective than drug therapy. He says that niacin (vitamin B-3) in sufficiently high doses is the most effective, least expensive, and safest treatment for schizophrenia and a number of other very serious mental illnesses. Hoffer and colleagues demonstrated this decades ago when, in the early 1950s, they successfully conducted the very first double-blind, placebo-controlled nutritional studies in the history of psychiatry.(4)
Article continues with references here.. Rigged Trials Part II