As Ben Goldacre says, "The people you should have been able to trust to fix these problems have failed you." The basic scenario at work in the pharmacy industry today is that the fox is in charge of the hen house. Drugs are being tested by the company that manufactures them, and their drug trials are - predictably - poorly designed, small, and hopelessly biased.
As a result, negative data is buried, small positive results are trumpeted, and new drugs are brought to market that are worse than placebos. Worse because they don't work any better than placebos, but they can have strong and damaging side effects, not to mention the cost and inconvenience.
And as a side effect of the way the pharmaceutical industry works, there are a lot of medical problems which (as Goldacre points out) are left unaddressed because no one can make money off them.
