John Ioannidis, […] Professor of Medicine at Stanford, his own analysis a few years ago, of 60,000 published medical studies for therapeutic interventions, revealed only about 7% of them were actually found to be high quality and relevant to patients. He wrote another paper in which he found that most published findings are false. So what’s going on here? … We have an epidemic of misinformed doctors and misinformed patients, rooted in:

• biased funding of research. That’s research that’s funded because it’s likely to be profitable, not beneficial for patients;
• biased reporting in medical journals, where they exaggerate the benefits of the drug and minimise the harms. From what’s come from the drug industry;
• biased reporting in the media;
• commercial conflicts of interest;
• and last but not least, an inability of doctors to understand and communicate health statistics.

When you put that all together you have something called a Medical Misinformation Mess. If there’s any distortion of any of those components, you are ultimately going to either give useless treatments to patients, or cause harm. The reality unfortunately is, when you look at best available evidence, it’s been corrupted by vested interests. And then patients are ultimately getting drugs where, if they were fully informed, they would likely choose, in many cases, not to take the drug.