Abstract

Industry-sponsored biomedical research is under the microscope. In an attempt to achieve just results in extraordinary cases, critics are suggesting regulations that would pervert the U.S. clinical trial process. However, the arguments made to justify such regulation are weak at best. All the proposals to regulate industry sponsorship of clinical trials that we surveyed suffer from some form of fallacious reasoning. In the interest of advocating sound policy, this article points out some of the most common reasoning errors found in the literature on financial conflicts of interest in clinical trials