Likewise, drug companies should have to reveal how many total clinical trials were conducted for each drug and how many of these trials were positive and how many were negative. If a new drug does better than a placebo in just two out of six clinical trials, you are going to think very differently about its efficacy than you would about that of another drug that beats a placebo in all six trials.

Drug companies might legitimately complain that there are many reasons a drug might fail to outperform a placebo besides ineffectiveness: quirks in the design of a trial; patients who were not typical of those with the disease; a dosage that was too low. But then the company should be happy to explain this to the public, since the goal is education, right?

Even savvy consumers cannot easily obtain this information because of the “file drawer effect”: Positive clinical trials are much more likely to be published than negative trials. And while drug companies now have to register their clinical trials in a federal database, they often don’t publish the results in a timely fashion, and it’s unrealistic to expect the public to hunt for this kind of data; it should be as clear as the blue sky in those idyllic drug ads.

The drug scorecard should also include something called the “number needed to treat,” or N.N.T. This is the number of patients that need to be treated for one to benefit, compared with a control in a clinical trial. For example, for a drug with a number needed to treat of six, six patients would have to be treated before one would benefit. The lower the number, the more effective the treatment. This is a clear measure that consumers could use to understand the efficacy of drugs that are invariably pitched as the next panacea.