Seven Ways You Can be Misled by Efficacy Studies

Abstract

Arguably, evaluating and comparing the efficacies of products is the most important activity of bovine practitioners. Some practitioners may believe that any legally marketed products must be effective due either to government mandate or to free market forces which would drive an ineffective product to ruin. Yet, there seems little basis for either notion. Even a relatively non-critical review of literature related to extant licensed biologicals leads one to conclude that many of them are - at best - of questionable efficacy. And, given the ease with which, frankly, quack products (e.g., various "immunological" and "nutritional" supplements) are marketed over a period of many years, it is difficult to support a conclusion that the free market does a good job of "efficacy screening."

The purpose of this report is to provide, in a hopefully humorous and satiric format, the seven principal means - intentional and unintentional, conscious and unconscious - by which reports of efficacy trials make biological and pharmaceutical products seem more effective than they really are.