OPEN ACCESS: All News
“Inverse benefit law” explains how drug marketing undermines patient safety
Cite this as:
BMJ
2011;342:d598
- Hypertension
- Dentistry and oral medicine
- Anxiety disorders (including OCD and PTSD)
- Drugs: cardiovascular system
- Guidelines
- Biological agents
- Diabetes
- Drugs: musculoskeletal and joint diseases
- Drugs: psychiatry
- GI bleeding
- Ischaemic heart disease
- Medical error/ patient safety
- Metabolic disorders
- Pain (neurology)
- Pain (palliative care)
- Patients
- Psychotic disorders (incl schizophrenia)
- Stroke
More topics 
Fewer topics
- Janice Hopkins Tanne
- 1New York
Drug companies show a clear, repeated pattern in which “drugs discovered with good science for a specific set of patients are marketed to a larger population” for whom they are less appropriate and less safe, says Howard Brody, professor and director of the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
The “inverse benefit law” was published online in the American Journal of Public Health (doi:10.2105/AJPH.2010.199844).
Dr Brody told the BMJ, “You have to be really sceptical and careful not be seduced by research findings that are …
Sign in
Article access
Article access for 1 day
Purchase this article for £20 $30 €32*
The PDF version can be downloaded as your personal record
Social bookmarking