Healthy Skepticism Library item: 10053

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Zhang Y, Soumerai SB.
Do newer prescription drugs pay for themselves? A reassessment of the evidence
Health Affairs 2007;
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/26/3/880

Abstract:

Citing evidence from studies conducted by Frank Lichtenberg, some health policy advocates have argued that, on average, use of new prescription drugs reduces total health care costs. While recognizing that the cross-sectional research design cannot guard against many biases that could overstate the results, we replicated the original study results and examined the findings’ sensitivity to different analytical approaches. Using the same data, we were able to replicate the original results; however, the original findings are not maintained under plausible alternative assumptions. More rigorous research on specific drugs and conditions is necessary before one can claim that newer drugs lower total health care costs.

Keywords:
Publication Types: Comment Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't Research Support, U.S. Gov't, P.H.S.

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909