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Understanding Pharmaceutical Research Manipulation in the Context of Accounting Manipulation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Extract

Good decision-making requires reliable information. In medicine, relevant information comes from clinical trials and other forms of scientific research. In business, one source is in corporate annual financial statements. As for-profit, publicly traded companies whose business is discovering, manufacturing, and marketing drugs, pharmaceutical companies sit at the nexus of these two fields. Determining the safety and efficacy of a pharmaceutical product and determining the profitability of a complex enterprise are similarly difficult tasks: each is fraught with deeply ambiguous information that requires sophisticated judgment to interpret reasonably.

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Symposium
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2013

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