Dr. David Healy is a professional psychiatrist, psychopharmacologist, scientist, and author who has spent years documenting serious problems in the pharmaceutical research and regulatory worlds.

I was honored to be invited to a presentation that he gave the other day that walked through ways in which pharmaceutical drug studies have been rigged over the years. The insights in his presentation were illuminating because it reveals a regulatory system that knows that some of the approved drugs don't work, or work less well than advertised, and that safety signals are buried through a variety of methods. Here is that talk.

Edit: The presentation slides are here.

There are a lot of eye opening moments here. One of those involves the way that medicated patients are moved across ledgers inappropriately. For instance, in the study of antidepressants where somebody who went off the drug and only then committed suicide was counted in the control group as opposed to there being a separate calculation for "drug exposure", which would be more appropriate. This is similar, though in the opposite [situationally convenient] direction for the "rolling cohort", to the statistical Sieve of the Dagan study that Mark Reeder discovered (and has never been answered by anyone so far as I've seen).

Dr. Healy points out that he is not against all the drugs that he talks about, though believes their use goes outside the bounds of appropriate application due to the fact that regulators simply allow drug manufacturers to get away with such misleading statistical tactics.

I could go on about the contents of the presentation, but Dr. Healy's presentation speaks for itself, and I have a tremendous amount of work to catch up on after moving twice and writing a chapter of a book over the past month.

After his presentation, Dr. Healy answered questions.

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