An interesting article from last week, sure to give you warm fuzzies about drug companies: Antidepressant Makers Withhold Data on Children. Says the article,
The companies say the studies are trade secrets. Researchers familiar with the unpublished data said the majority of secret trials show that children taking the medicines did not get any better than children taking dummy pills. …
“Conflicts of interest and the company control of the data have thrown out the scientific method,” said Vera Hassner Sharav, a critic of the drugs and a patients’ rights advocate. “If hundreds of trials don’t work out, they don’t publish them, they don’t talk about them.”
It’s hard enough to find a doctor you can trust to process the medical information with your personal interests in mind, but you wish they had all of the data available to them. It doesn’t help that academic medical researchers are increasingly funded by industry as well.
A related article yesterday goes on to discuss the FDA panel put together to discuss possible evidence that antidepressants make some children suicidal, one of the study results drug companies aren’t exactly advertising. The result was a recommendation from the panel for stronger warnings and continued investigation.