[5] In January 2013 Goldacre joined the Cochrane Collaboration, British Medical Journal and others in setting up AllTrials, a campaign calling for the results of all past and current clinical trials to be reported.

[6] The British House of Commons Public Accounts Committee expressed concern in January 2014 that drug companies were still only publishing around 50 percent of clinical-trial results.

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.

In their forty years of practice after leaving medical school, doctors hear about what works through ad hoc oral traditions, from sales reps, colleagues or journals.

And finally, academic papers, which everyone thinks of as objective, are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the companies, without disclosure.

[10] An example he gives of the difficulty of obtaining missing data from drug companies is that of oseltamivir (Tamiflu), manufactured by Roche to reduce the complications of bird flu.

Bad Pharma charts the efforts of independent researchers, particularly Tom Jefferson of the Cochrane Collaboration Respiratory Group, to gain access to information about the drug.

[12] Participants are usually taken from the poorest groups in society, and outsourcing increasingly means that trials may be conducted in countries with low wages by contract research organizations (CROs).

The families taking part in the trial were apparently not told that the competing antibiotic at the effective dose was available from Médecins Sans Frontières in the next-door building.

[21] In chapter five Goldacre suggests using the General Practice Research Database in the UK, which contains the anonymized records of several million patients, to conduct randomized trials to determine the most effective of competing treatments.

The trials would not be blind – patients would know which statin they had been prescribed – but Goldacre writes that they would be unlikely to hold such firm beliefs about which one is preferable to the extent that it could affect their health.

He cites as examples the statins atorvastatin (Lipitor, made by Pfizer) and simvastatin (Zocor), which he writes seem to be equally effective, or at least there is no evidence to suggest otherwise.

[23] He addresses the issue of medicalization of certain conditions (or, as he argues, of personhood), whereby pharmaceutical companies "widen the boundaries of diagnosis" before offering solutions.

Female sexual dysfunction was highlighted in 1999 by a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which alleged that 43 percent of women were suffering from it.

[25] It discusses how PR firms promote stories from patients who complain in the media that certain drugs are not made available by the funder, which in the UK is the NHS and the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).

Two breast-cancer patients who campaigned in the UK in 2006 for trastuzumab (Herceptin) to be available on the NHS were being handled by a law firm working for Roche, the drug's manufacturer.

(He praises the website of the American Medical Student Association – www.amsascorecard.org – which ranks institutions according to their conflict-of-interest policies, writing that it makes him "feel weepy.")

[29] He also asks for full disclosure of all past clinical trial results, and a list of academic papers that were, as he puts it, "rigged" by industry, so that they can be retracted or annotated.

[33] Helen Lewis in the New Statesman called it an important book,[34] while Luisa Dillner, writing in the Guardian, described it as a "thorough piece of investigative medical journalism".

He is less strong in explaining the complex background reality, such as the general constraints and individual slips of regulators and pharma companies' employees."

Jack also argued that the book failed to reflect how many lives have been improved by the current system, for example with new treatments for HIV, rheumatoid arthritis and cancer.

The committee said it was "surprised and concerned" to learn that information from clinical trials is routinely withheld from doctors, and recommended that the Department of Health take steps to ensure that all clinical-trial data be made available for currently prescribed treatments.

Ben Adams, "Goldacre takes ABPI to task over book snub" Archived 7 January 2014 at the Wayback Machine, Pharma Times, 12 October 2012.