Patients given orlistat had twice as many days with adverse events, but this was not reported

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Wednesday, August 17, 2016 10:00 am Email this article

“We also discovered that participants treated with orlistat experienced twice as many days with adverse events as participants treated with placebo… Furthermore, compared with the placebo group, adverse events in the orlistat group were more severe... [however] None of this was stated in the [clinical study reports] or in the published paper,” according to an analysis of orlistat studies by Prof. Peter Gotzsche, MD and others from the Cochrane Collaboration.

Is the same thing true for studies of other drugs?

Do you believe that this is also true for studies of cholesterol drugs (statins) and blood pressure drugs and diabetes drugs and antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs and sleeping pills and bone-building drugs and acid-blocking drugs and every other drug out there?

Yes, of course it is.

I believe drug-induced side effects are dramatically underreported

I believe that drug-induced side effects are dramatically underreported in all drug studies sponsored by the drug companies.

This is just one example to prove this.

I no longer believe any drug studies

This is why I no longer believe any drug study sponsored by the drug companies or any review paper written by anyone paid by the drug companies as I wrote about here.

What the drug industry publishes should be viewed as an advertisement and nothing else

This is why Prof. Peter Gotzsche, MD, cofounder of the Cochrane Collaboration, said “What the drug industry publishes, even in the New England Journal of Medicine, should be viewed as an advertisement, and nothing else,” as he stated in the video clip posted here.

Reference

Schroll JB, Penninga EI, and Gotzsche PC. Assessment of Adverse Events in Protocols, Clinical Study Reports, and Published Papers of Trials of Orlistat: A Document Analysis. PLoS Med, 2016 Aug; 13(8): e1002101.

Author’s Contact Info

Jeppe Bennekou Schroll
Nordic Cochrane Centre
Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen, Denmark
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Articles on the same subject can be found here:

• Alii (orlistat) - (also see Xenical)

• Drug company lies

• Xenical (orlistat)