Wow, surprise...
Just got this week's new issue from the newsagent's and behold, on the first page:
Just got this week's new issue from the newsagent's and behold, on the first page:
New Scientist said:Hearts on our sleeves
We need transparent trials to maintain confidence in medicine
Tens of millions of people took Vioxx for their arthritis between 1999 and 2004. Tens of thousands probably had a heart attack as a result. [...]
Access to data is at the centre of many controversies in modern medicine - not just to do with the usefulness of drugs, but also of treatments (such as exercise for chronic fatigue syndrome) [...Other topics, including trials of statins...]
That has provoked a furious war of words with those who do have access to the data. They say complex ownership and usage conditions mean it can't be released widely. That's a familiar problem: similar issues dogged the release of raw data from the 2011 PACE trial of chronic fatigue syndrome treatments, which a tribunal finally ordered to be released last year. [...]