'An Extremely Foul Technique'

If you feel like depressing yourself today, check out this blog post from Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline. Lowe points to an analysis performed on a clinical trial for gabapentin (marketed by Pfizer under the name Neurontin) in the '90s. "The authors find, by analyzing a large trove of documents released during lawsuit discovery proceedings, that [the clinical trial] was not really intended to be a clinical trial. Instead, it was a marketing program," Lowe writes. The study seems to have been unblinded and uncontrolled, he notes, adding: "This is an extremely foul technique, which brings the companies who use it, the entire drug industry, and the whole idea of clinical research into disrepute."