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In a brief, sweeping and somewhat rambling history of psychopharmacology, Healy hit a lot of fly balls. He said that drugs "have played or threaten to play a part in a changing of the social order." He intimated that psychiatric drugs, unlike illegal drugs, are a form of institutional control. In the Nov. 30, 2000 lecture, titled "Psychopharmacology and the Government of the Self," he also made the following statements:

1. "...The era of Depression that we have lived through in the 1990s in the West has arguably been a politically and economically constructed era that bears little relationship to any clinical facts. An era that has changed popular culture by replacing a psychobabble of Freudian terms with a new biobabble about low serotonin levels and the like."
2. "...Both psychiatry and anti-psychiatry were swept away and replaced by a new corporate psychiatry. [John Kenneth] Galbraith has argued we no longer have free markets; corporations work out what they have to sell and then prepare the market so that we will want those products. It works for cars, oil, and everything else, why would it not work for psychiatry? Prescription-only status makes the psychiatric market easier than almost any other market - a comparatively few hearts and minds need to be won."
3. "...The best-selling drugs in modern medicine do something similar - they don't treat disease. They manage risks. This is clearly true of the anti-hypertensives, the lipid-lowering agents and other drugs. It is true also of antidepressants, which have been sold on the back of efforts to reduce risks of suicide. We are in an era, which is popularly portrayed as an "Evidence Based Medicine" era. What can go wrong if we have clinical trial evidence to demonstrate what works and what doesn't work, if we but adhere to this evidence. What more can we do than that?" ...

But Healy and his colleagues at Rxisk argue that evidence-based medicine is flawed because important information ends up being systematically buried or corrupted. In his 2012 book Pharmageddon, Healy argues (and provides evidence) that close to 30 percent of the clinical drug trials that have been undertaken remain unreported; and of the 50 percent that have been reported, almost all are ghostwritten by scientists for pharmaceutical companies.

Perhaps more frighteningly, Healy reports that roughly 25 percent of published clinical drug trials are statistically altered, to provide evidence that a drug works well and is safe. And in 100 percent of the cases, the data from the trials remain inaccessible to scrutiny. Yet, he writes, 80 percent of the reports on adverse consequences of drug treatment, dismissed as anecdotes, have turned out to be correct. "Given these facts," Healy writes, "it is not reasonable to suggest that the observations of doctors and patients are less reliable than clinical trial evidence."

Healy's push to abandon evidence-based medicine is not at attempt to get rid of randomized, triple-blind and placebo-based control trials, but to show the degree to which these trials are controlled by the pharmaceutical industry. So Rxisk's preference for "data-based medicine" is simply a euphemism. It's a push to expand evidence-based medicine to include full clinical trial transparency and to put anecdotes, specifically from patients, into the wider scientific analysis of drug efficacy.