In medicine, there’s almost no such thing as a free lunch. Just about every drug or intervention will have its side effects.

Ideally, rigorous studies and the regulatory process will ensure that an approved drug’s benefits clearly outweigh any potential harms. But sometimes, researchers (and patients) will uncover side effects that went unnoticed during the approval process. Other times, more rarely, a drug’s maker is revealed to have buried incriminating information about their drug’s harms from the public or to have created a product that doesn’t work at all as intended. And when that happens, a bad or ineffective treatment can spark a major scandal.

There’s no shortage of pharmaceutical scandals that have occurred over the years, but to keep things short, let’s just focus on some of t

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