Hiding the Truth
It should not be a surprise by now that drug manufacturers will do just about anything to get and keep their products on the market. However, it does still present as an unpleasant shock to learn that 30 percent of antidepressant drug studies are never published because they showed that the tested drug failed to work.
On top of that, some of the negative studies that got published were reworked to make it appear as if the experiment had yielded a positive outcome.
This information was unearthed by a research team lead by Eric Turner of the Oregon Health & Science University. Their results were recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Turner’s group looked at 74 studies of 12 different antidepressants and found that all but one of the 38 positive tests were published as compared to only three of the studies that turned up negative, and about a dozen other negative experiments were re-written as to appear positive.
Several of the culprits are widely-used antidepressant medications. For example, Paxil (by GlaxoSmithKline) produced seven negative studies, five of which were never printed. Wellbutrin SR (also by GSK) had only three total studies to its name, two of which were negative and never published. Zoloft (from Pfizer) was studied five times with three unpublished negative showings and a fourth negative that was rewritten as if the drug had in fact worked.
Since adverse effects to these drugs can be catastrophic, it is critical that you talk to your doctor and even contact an experienced defective drugs attorney for professional insight.