There are lies, damn lies and statistics

It was Mark Twain who said: “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

That certainly applies to the mathematical trick used by Big Pharma to deceive us into believing that drugs are beneficial. Here’s an analogy:

If a $100 item in the store is discounted 2%, it is not an impressive number. If the discount is increased to 3%, the number still is unimpressive, because the absolute gain in discount would be only 1%. However, if you are a con artist and want to fool people into thinking that a 1% gain is a wonderful deal, all you have to do is compare the new 3% discount with the previous 2% discount. That is called a “relative” comparison, whereas comparing to the original price would be an “absolute” comparison.

By comparing the new 3% discount to the old 2% discount, you can honestly tell your victim that it is an “improvement” of 50%!Why? Because a 3% discount is 50% higher than a 2% discount. It still is only a 1% absolute gain, but you would not mention that. Let the suckers figure it out for themselves.

Three afflicted patients out of a hundred in a control group represents a 3% affliction rate, but two patients afflicted in a treatment group after taking medication represent a 33% “improvement” relative to three patients in the control group. The drug company will claim “33% reduced risk” because dropping from three to two represents a 33% reduction.

As with products in a store, however, reality is not altered by this trick. Those in the treated group still will have a mere 1% absolute benefit and, for that, they pay a fortune and assume the risk of side effects. They do this only because they have been tricked into thinking that the odds are much more favorable than they really are.

And it gets worse. When we take into consideration the massive fraud that has been uncovered within the testing programs of the largest drug companies, we have good reason to be suspicious of claims of any absolute benefit at all, not even 1%. I believe that, if the tests were not rigged, the numbers would be negative, which means more harm than benefit.

But never mind that. There are drugs to sell!

G. Edward Griffin
2015 October 9