Reference no: EM133295840

Question: This Ted Talk spoken by Sile Lane talks about how half of all clinical trials have not yet been published. That means that doctors and researchers lack half of the necessary information that they need to properly do their jobs. Lane speaks of a government regulator that had suggested that the UK purchased stock of the drug Tamiflu, but that regulator had only seen a selected portion of the clinical trials. After finally putting all of the trials together they found out that Tamiflu just wasn't that effective after all, that was 480 million pounds wasted. Lane says that a positive result of a clinical trial is twice as likely to be published than a negative result leading to false conclustions of that drug. Lane also talks about how participants in those trials have risked their health for the results to not even be published. Lane says that going forward all clinical trials must be completely transparent to the public, and even more importantly that they release all information about older trial results so we can have a good understanding of what we need to change. How would you force companies to share all of their results with the public, even the ones that may prove their drug unsafe or ineffective? Do you think that we should allow companies to withhold clinical trial results in order for their drug to become more successful? How would you feel if you participated in one of these trials and the results were never published? Lastly, how would you feel if you had a negative response to a drug that could have been prevented if all of the clinical results were published for that medicine?