Bad Pharma

Why it’s on the list: Goldacre’s indictment of the pharmaceutical evidence base — unpublished negative trials, surrogate endpoints, ghostwritten papers, regulators who see data the doctors do not. The industry answer for pharma, argued from the trial registry outward.

Where I saw it: In the reply thread to @WillManidis’s question, “what is the single best book you can read that will explain an entire industry?” (June 2, 2025) — a crowd-sourced list Kyle recovered by hand and saved to his Apple Note “Books To Read”; the full set of replies lives on what is the single best book… (tweet). It was listed there as “Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre”.

Connections

• Healthcare — the industry.
• Regulation — the book is largely about what regulators do and do not require.
• Open Source Knowledge — trial registration and data publication are Goldacre’s proposed fix.
• Science — publication bias as a structural, not moral, failure.
• what is the single best book… (tweet) — the thread this recommendation came from.