Are doctors prescribing medicine based on incomplete data? A global group of health care experts thinks so, and has called on the US presidential candidates to state how they will fix the problem.
In an open letter to the candidates published Thursday in The BMJ, a leading medical journal, the group says that too many drug companies report only partial results of clinical trial data. As a result, the experts say, doctors then decide which medicines to prescribe based on journal articles that don’t give an accurate picture.
The group wants all presidential candidates to say whether they support access to all clinical trial data held by federal agencies, regardless of what the trials were about, who sponsored them, what county they were conducted in, or what they found.
