All they get is the drug company's analysis of that data, which leaves the door wide open for manipulation and obfuscation.

As noted by Malhotra, "It's not scientific, it's not ethical … and it's not democratic." Most doctors, unless they're involved in the peer review process, are not even aware of this, which is why they rarely ever question published science. Yet data analyses by Stanford professor Dr. John Ionnidis show that "the greater the financial interest in a given field, the less likely the research findings are to be true," Malhotra says.