Overdosed America
This book explains how the pharmaceutical companies distort medical knowledge, mislead doctors, and compromise the health of patients.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
13mentions
4people
2012–2018years
62% recommend38% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > especially considering the US is the only first world country where direct-to-consumer marketing is allowed for medications.
Relevant book on this topic, and highly recommended read: https://www.amazon.com/Overdosed-America-Promise-American-Me...
- It was Pfizer that pioneered that, and it's cataloged wonderfully in the book "Overdosed America"
- > If the current standard of care is a drug and you test against it, aren't you showing it's more effective?
The main issue is that a drug can be more effective than an older drug but still be less effective than taking no drug at all.
But given all the problems, both theoretical and practical, with current drug trials, there is pretty much no guarantee of anything. Just because something makes sense on paper doesn't mean that it's actually true. There are a number of books about the issues with drug trials... Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre, The Truth About Drug Companies by Marcia Angell, Overdosed America, etc. All of these books cover largely different issues, so imho it's worth reading them all.
- "Citations? This is a pretty big claim for a FDA-approved drug that was the most profitable drug on the market as of 2011."
There are a bunch of books about this that you can get on Amazon. A good one I read is Overdosed America. But if you search on Amazon for 'statin' there are a lot more books that are specifically about this.
"A quick literature search found Lipitor to be more efficacious[3] (Double blinded, placebo controlled, n = 1049)."
The academic literature generally isn't a reliable source for information about pharmaceutical drugs, unless it's one of the NIH trials or another trial sponsored by an independent entity. The only way to get accurate information from trials sponsored by pharma companies is to FOIA the FDA, unless the raw data is on clinicaltrials.gov which it almost never is. There are again a number of books that explain why this is, I personally like both Overdosed America (again) and also Marcia Angell's book The Truth About Drug Companies. I'm sure Ben Goldacre's new book probably covers the same stuff though.
"eep in mind that, as with all drugs, both are dose-dependent and have unpleasant side-effects when taken in combination with certain drugs, foods, and certain patient populations, such as pregnant women and those with liver disease."
Plant-based medicines tend to be fairly forgiving about dosage. E.g. you're probably not going to get sick from eating any reasonably amount of oyster mushrooms, at least as long as they're fresh and you cook them properly.
- > There are a bunch of books about this that you can get on Amazon. A good one I read is Overdosed America. But if you search on Amazon for 'statin' there are a lot more books that are specifically about this.
Make an argument here and cite your sources here, I'm not going to read a book just so I can respond to your post in half a month...
> The academic literature generally isn't a reliable source for information about pharmaceutical drugs, unless it's one of the NIH trials or another trial sponsored by an independent entity
How's a paper in a top tier medical journal[1]? It's paywalled, but if you actually care enough to read the information on the other side, I can grab you a copy. It's even registered on clinicaltrials.gov[2].
> I'm sure Ben Goldacre's new book probably covers the same stuff though.
This is one that I am somewhat familiar with. He makes plenty of good points with regards to transparency of information and reducing reporting bias, but you can't leap from that to the biggest drug on the market right now having zero efficacy.
> Plant-based medicines tend to be fairly forgiving about dosage. E.g. you're probably not going to get sick from eating any reasonably amount of oyster mushrooms, at least as long as they're fresh and you cook them properly.
False[4]. The end effect of consuming the plant material is a chemical ended up in your circulation at a given concentration. If that concentration is too high, you'll see adverse effects. If it's too low, you won't see any effect. At least in pill form, you know your dose and have quality assurance about that fact.
And we're ignoring the potential case of the process of cooking the food destroying the active compound...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18061058
[2] http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01687686
- "Make an argument here and cite your sources here, I'm not going to read a book just so I can respond to your post in half a month..."
I'm not especially interested in discussing this at length, I listed the books I did for the benefit of you and anyone else who is interested. You could instead read Wikipedia and random papers you find on Google scholar, but I don't think you'll really learn much that way. And in Overdosed America it's really only one or two chapters that are relevant.
"How's a paper in a top tier medical journal[1]?"
Not really worth much unless it's a large NIH trial, a well-cited meta study, or an IOM report. Individual research papers are generally pretty worthless, at least for medical related stuff.
