All drug trials yield great results

The pharmaceutical industry would like you to believe that.  However, like most of man's endeavors, creating new drugs that are effective is not a simple task and does not always work.  Yet, we seldom learn about drug failures.  Sure, the medical journals are filled with supposedly perfect trials but studies have shown that half of all the clinical trials ever conducted and completed on the treatments in use today have never been published in academic journals.Why do you suppose that is the case?  Trials that show that a particular drug has failed just don't get written up.

In 2007 the FDA passed a law which required that new clinical trials conducted in the United States post summaries of their results at within a year of completion at a government web site, or be fined $10,000 a day.  Five years later, the British Medical Journal found that four out of five trials covered by the legislation had ignored the reporting requirements and no one was fined for violating the law.

And then there's the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors.  It directed that its members never again publish any clinical trial unless its existence had been declared on a publicly accessible registry before the trial began. The result from a subsequent study: the editors had broken their promise: more than half of all trials published in leading journals still weren’t properly registered, and a quarter weren’t registered at all.