Thank you Gill. This paragraph struck me in particular:
"Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques that are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don't like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug's true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in a drug's life, and even then they don't give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion."
This is all of a piece with how the few trials of OTC supplements are rigged to produce negative results:
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www.afibbers.org]
PeggyM
"Its kind of like doing a study on Xeralto, as an analogy, and then making sure (either willfully or via some oversights) that the subjects' average dosage was around half again or less the dose required, say using a Xeralto dose of approximately 2.5mg to 5mg a day! This when a number of other studies has shown from 15mg to 20mg is needed in most cases to exceed or equal warfarin's stroke reduction! Can you imagine such a study then branding Xeralto as 'of questionable benefit for strokes'from their conclusion when using doses that just barely reach the threshold for consistent important CV benefits such as stroke reduction?! These kind of studies often wind up sowing more confusion and mistaken conclusions rather than contributing to real clarity and accuracy on the subject.. I'm afraid."
