Peter Singer and Ben Goldacre
The Ethical View of Peter Singer Toward Ben Goldacre
Ben Goldacre's book Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients (2013) is an important testament to the concerns of modern day medicine. There are several problems discussed in the book, one of which is the sponsorship of trials into new medicines. To that end, Goldacre writes that these medications are not tested by independent groups or scientists, but rather by the people and companies from which they are manufactured (xi). This is a serious issue from an ethical standpoint, of course, which is something noted by Peter Singer in his work Practical Ethics (2011).
While Singer does not specifically address Goldacre or big pharma, he does address many of the issues that Goldacre also focuses on. For example, how Goldacre would be against drug companies because of the way those companies avoid what is truly ethical and end up only doing what is best for themselves. While the idea that these companies would look out for themselves would make sense, companies have an ethical responsibility to look out for the people who are receiving the products they are creating (Singer, 12). However, the trials for the medications Goldacre references are designed poorly, and the patients that are used are not actually representative of the body of patients one would expect to see if the drugs were in wide usage for a specific medical condition (Goldacre, xi).
In his writings,...
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