The Bad Guidelines campaign gets a mention today in the BMJ "Lancet withdraws its support of document on collaboration between doctors and drug industry" and Wired "Campaign scrutinises relationship between doctors and pharmaceutical industry".
"It's important to be clear that these aren't controversial issues, nor are they "anti-industry". We're talking about the fabric of evidence based medicine: how evidence is brought together, and then disseminated to doctors and patients, to make informed decisions. Industry education and drug reps are biased ways to disseminate evidence to practitioners. Withheld trial results are an ongoing problem, and this distorts the evidence that doctors and patients use. This is the mainstream bread and butter of how medicine works, and we need to have realistic open discussions about the problems, not headline statements that say everything is fine."
Dr Ben Goldacre
"It's important to be clear that these aren't controversial issues, nor are they "anti-industry". We're talking about the fabric of evidence based medicine: how evidence is brought together, and then disseminated to doctors and patients, to make informed decisions. Industry education and drug reps are biased ways to disseminate evidence to practitioners. Withheld trial results are an ongoing problem, and this distorts the evidence that doctors and patients use. This is the mainstream bread and butter of how medicine works, and we need to have realistic open discussions about the problems, not headline statements that say everything is fine."
Dr Ben Goldacre