William Leith5 September 2013
In this study, which should cause a scandal, Ben Goldacre, a doctor, examines the relationship between people who are ill and the drugs they are prescribed. In the sphere of medicine, we tend to think the crucial relationship is between doctor and patient. But the scandalous relationship, as he demonstrates, exists between the people who make the drugs and the doctors. “Medicine is broken: the plane flies but it crashes much more often than it needs to,” he tells us at the start. That’s because the people who make the drugs are also the people who test them — and the system is fixed. This is a brilliant piece of work.
