Words of Wisdom

Dr. Roy Poses at Health Care Renewal has a fantastic post about the fabricated data regarding the antibiotic Ketek, as well as the FDA's decision to look the other way regarding Ketek's poor safety record. I strongly suggest y'all read the full post here.

At the bottom of the post, after describing much about the Ketek story, Dr. Poses offers the following:

Unfortunately, these sorts of stories suggest that patients and physicians need to be very skeptical about the integrity of the evidence used to support use of the latest, greatest, and most expensive pharmaceuticals. If the drug industry wants to improve its sagging reputation, it will have to show that it can clean up how it does clinical research. Or perhaps we ought to think about getting drug (and biotechnology and device) companies out of the business of sponsoring clinical research on products in which they have vested interests? Of course, such a change will threaten quite a few peoples' sources of incomes, so we can expect plenty of resistance to it.

Amen!