"Smart, funny, clear, unflinching: Ben Goldacre is my hero." —Mary Roach, author of Stiff, Spook, and BonkWe like to imagine that medicine is based on evidence and the results of fair testing and clinical trials. In reality, those tests and trials are often profoundly flawed. We like to imagine that doctors who write prescriptions for everything from antidepressants to cancer drugs to heart medication are familiar with the research literature about these drugs, when in reality much of the research is hidden from them by drug companies. We like to imagine that doctors are impartially educated, when in reality much of their education is funded by the pharmaceutical industry. We like to imagine that regulators have some code of ethics and let only effective drugs onto the market, when in reality they approve useless drugs, with data on side effects casually withheld from doctors and patients. All these problems have been shielded from public scrutiny because they are too complex to capture in a sound bite. Ben Goldacre shows that the true scale of this murderous disaster fully reveals itself only when the details are untangled. He believes we should all be able to understand precisely how data manipulation works and how research misconduct in the medical industry affects us on a global scale. With Goldacre's characteristic flair and a forensic attention to detail, Bad Pharma reveals a shockingly broken system in need of regulation. This is the pharmaceutical industry as it has never been seen before.

An urgent examination of statins, the drugs at the heart of debates on evidence-based medicine and of the malign influence of Big PharmaStatins are the single most commonly prescribed class of drugs in the developed world. They're taken by more than 100 million patients, with millions more people being offered them every year.We know that statins do some good. But we don't know how big the benefits are. We don't know which statins are the best. We don't know how common the side effects are. We don't give clear information to patients, so they are deprived of their right to make informed decisions about the trade-off between benefits, inconvenience, and risk. All this can be fixed with a few simple changes that weld big data onto the heart and art of medicine.In Statins, drawing on his own research, Ben Goldacre gives patients the tools they need to make their own decisions. Along the way he explores industry misdeeds; the nocebo effect, the evil twin of the placebo effect, where side effects are caused by the power of fear alone; and the differences in patients' desire for treatment and doctors' failures to empathize with this. With his characteristic wit and energy, Goldacre exposes the flaws in modern medicine and maps out the future it deserves.

"Smart, funny, clear, unflinching: Ben Goldacre is my hero." —Mary Roach, author of Stiff, Spook, and BonkWe like to imagine that medicine is based on evidence and the results of fair testing and clinical trials. In reality, those tests and trials are often profoundly flawed. We like to imagine that doctors who write prescriptions for everything from antidepressants to cancer drugs to heart medication are familiar with the research literature about these drugs, when in reality much of the research is hidden from them by drug companies. We like to imagine that doctors are impartially educated, when in reality much of their education is funded by the pharmaceutical industry. We like to imagine that regulators have some code of ethics and let only effective drugs onto the market, when in reality they approve useless drugs, with data on side effects casually withheld from doctors and patients. All these problems have been shielded from public scrutiny because they are too complex to capture in a sound bite. Ben Goldacre shows that the true scale of this murderous disaster fully reveals itself only when the details are untangled. He believes we should all be able to understand precisely how data manipulation works and how research misconduct in the medical industry affects us on a global scale. With Goldacre's characteristic flair and a forensic attention to detail, Bad Pharma reveals a shockingly broken system in need of regulation. This is the pharmaceutical industry as it has never been seen before.

An urgent examination of statins, the drugs at the heart of debates on evidence-based medicine and of the malign influence of Big PharmaStatins are the single most commonly prescribed class of drugs in the developed world. They're taken by more than 100 million patients, with millions more people being offered them every year.We know that statins do some good. But we don't know how big the benefits are. We don't know which statins are the best. We don't know how common the side effects are. We don't give clear information to patients, so they are deprived of their right to make informed decisions about the trade-off between benefits, inconvenience, and risk. All this can be fixed with a few simple changes that weld big data onto the heart and art of medicine.In Statins, drawing on his own research, Ben Goldacre gives patients the tools they need to make their own decisions. Along the way he explores industry misdeeds; the nocebo effect, the evil twin of the placebo effect, where side effects are caused by the power of fear alone; and the differences in patients' desire for treatment and doctors' failures to empathize with this. With his characteristic wit and energy, Goldacre exposes the flaws in modern medicine and maps out the future it deserves.