WATCH: What Doctors Don't Know About The Drugs They Prescribe

Ben Goldacre | Huffington Post | April 5, 2013

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TEDTalks can sometimes portray science in triumphalist tones, with fabulous innovations that are changing the world forever. But the real action in science is often around dirty, messy, angry problems, and my TEDTalk is about the dirtiest I've seen yet.

Doctors need the results of clinical trials to make informed choices, with their patients, about which treatment to use. But the best currently available evidence estimates that half of all clinical trials, for the treatments we use today, have never been published. This problem is the same for industry-sponsored trials and independent academic studies, across all fields of medicine from surgery to oncology, and it represents an enormous hidden hole for everything we do. Doctors can't make informed decisions, when half the evidence is missing.