Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11258

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

White C.
NICE delays decision on drugs for macular degeneration
BMJ 2007 Aug 18; 335:(7615):319
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/335/7615/319-a

Abstract:

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has had to delay its final decision on two drugs for age related macular degeneration after mounting pressure from charities and healthcare professionals.

NICE, which advises health authorities in England and Wales on the treatments to use on the NHS, issued preliminary guidance in June on the use of ranibizumab (marketed as Lucentis) and pegaptanib (Macugen) for the treatment of the disease. Both drugs are already available in Scotland.

It argued that pegaptanib should not be used at all and that ranibizumab should be prescribed only to the one in five people with the neovascular or “wet” form of the disease and only where both eyes were affected and in the better seeing eye only.

Both drugs target vascular endothelial growth factor, high concentrations of which can prompt excess blood vessel formation and fluid leakage in the eye.

Around 26 000 . . .

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts

If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Announcements

PharmedOut’s annual conference: Missing The Target: When Practitioners Harm More Than Heal

No Free Lunch is merging with Healthy Skepticism

Conference program: Pharma Knows Best? Managing Medical Knowledge

Prescrire’s proposals for France’s national conference on medicines policy

Pharmed Out Conference ‘Pharma Knows Best? Managing Medical Knowledge’

More announcements

What's new on this site

Library Home

Library Search

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