Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11109

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

Iheanacho I.
Drugs, tales, and other stories: Dunno, mate
BMJ 2007 Jul 21; 335:(7611):160
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/335/7611/160-a

Abstract:

Having produced a new treatment, drug companies take great care to avoid testing it too exhaustively in patients. Now, such an assertion would provoke howls of protest from the drug industry, which would no doubt point out just how much clinical research it does (lots) and contrast this with the amount of non-industry development of new drugs (very little).

While some of this counter-argument is half true, it doesn’t alter the fact that too much essential information about many new drugs is missing when these products appear on the market. A simple demonstration of this fact involves subjecting examples of new drugs to two simple questions. Firstly, have they been directly compared with standard comparator treatments in appropriately designed trials? Secondly, does the available research allow confident prediction of the effects (both helpful and harmful) of the drugs in patients from the general population, particularly in the long term? The . . .