Fixing Your Medicine: AllTrials Campaign Launches in US

NEW YORK, July 29, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Fifty groups representing 500,000 patients, doctors, and researchers will come together on Wednesday, July 29, to launch the AllTrials campaign in the US. The global campaign calls for every clinical trial, past, present, and future, to be registered and the results from it reported.

Campaign co-founder Dr Ben Goldacre explains: "Patients want the treatments that are best for them. This needs good quality evidence on what works. Unfortunately, we now know that around half of all clinical trials, on the treatments we use today, are withheld from doctors, researchers, and patients. This makes a mockery of our efforts to make truly informed decisions. It also puts the reputation of the entire medical profession—and pharma—on the line."

"Imagine there was an election," says Steven Woloshin MD, a professor at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. "Would you trust the results if only half of the votes were reported? Imagine if the winner of the election was the one who decided which half of the voting was reported? That would be crazy, but that's what the situation is when trials are not reported."

US supporters include the American Medical Students Association, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and patient groups such as amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research, the Ovarian Cancer Alliance of San Diego, The Well Project, and many others. [LINK]

"We provided our bodies, our tissue samples, our data," says patient activist AnnaMarie Ciccarella. "I've heard the same sentiment expressed many times from patients in clinical trials, 'This may not help me, but it may help another person.' It's time to honor that sentiment."

Since 2013, AllTrials has won support from almost 600 patient groups, professional societies, and academic institutions, and 85 thousand members of the public. The global campaign now represents 500 million patients, and it has helped change the law in Europe so that, starting in 2016, all drug clinical trials will be publicly registered and their results reported. [LINK]    

Last week AllTrials announced that pharmaceutical investors representing more than $3.8 trillion in assets are supporting the campaign. [LINK]

"The world is moving, inexorably, toward data transparency and collaboration," said Trevor Butterworth, Director of Sense About Science USA. "AllTrials is not just on the right side of history, it's getting us there."

Resources for Editors and Reporters

List of supporting organizations in US, updated and with statements [LINK]

Why AllTrials matters to Americans [LINK]

A history of the campaign in the words of the founders [LINK]

Websites: AllTrials.net  [LINK]   Sense About Science USA [LINK]

Media contacts [LINK]

AllTrials is a campaign launched in January 2013, calling for all past and present clinical trials to be registered and their results reported. It is an initiative of Ben Goldacre, BMJ, Centre for Evidence-based Medicine, Cochrane Collaboration, James Lind Initiative, PLOS and Sense About Science and is being led in the US by Sense About Science USA, Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine,  Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice.

Sense About Science USA is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that aims to create and curate a national conversation about the value of scientific research the importance of evidence and transparency. Founded in 2014, SAS USA is the American branch of the British charitable trust founded in 2002, Sense About Science.

SOURCE Sense About Science USA

Related Links

http://www.senseaboutscienceusa.org