Why it's about to get a lot harder to hide the results of medical studies - Vox

"This is a very scary fact about modern medicine: if researchers don't like the results they get from clinical trials, they can simply hide them — and none of us, the people who take the various drugs and devices under testing, will ever know. Results that might show a drug doesn't work or has serious side effects can, under our current clinical trials system, never see the light of day. Studies have shown that we have a skewed picture of the evidence that underlies much of clinical practice because there's no centralized system for disseminating information about clinical trials results, whether positive, negative, or inconclusive. 'Imagine your 10-year-old daughter was in the town’s annual gymnastics competition,' says Deborah Zarin, director of ClinicalTrials.gov. 'She has been practicing for months. In the finals, she was up against the daughter of the judge. At the end of the competition, the judge goes into a back office, comes out and declares his daughter the winner. There is no transparency about what the criteria were, and how the decision was made.' For over a decade, Dr. Zarin, a Harvard-trained MD, has been trying to change that. She has earned a reputation as a crusader for open data, quietly presiding over the world's largest database of clinical trials, ClinicalTrials.gov. Established in 2000, and operated by the NIH, it now holds information from more than 180,000 studies in humans in over 180 countries ..."