Why It’s about to Get a Lot Harder to Hide the Results of Medical Studies

December 9, 2014

(Vox) – This is a very scary fact about modern medicine: if researchers don’t like the results they get from clinical trials, they can simply hide them — and none of us, the people who use the various drugs and devices under testing, will ever know. Results that might show a drug doesn’t work or has serious side effects can, under our current clinical trials system, never see the light of day. Studies have shown that we have a skewed picture of the evidence that underlies much of clinical practice because there’s no centralized system for disseminating information about clinical trials results, whether positive, negative, or inconclusive.