Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11655

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

Editorial .
Medicines for children: safety as an afterthought
The Lancet 2007 Oct 6; 370:(9594):1190
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673607615207/fulltext

Abstract:

On Sept 21, WHO released a long overdue and thorough report, Safety of medicines for children, that highlights the unacceptable state of monitoring medicine-related problems in children worldwide.

Many issues make safety of paediatric medicines an extremely difficult area to study. Medicines are often used in an off-label or unlicensed way-ie, they have not been tested in a particular age group or are given using adult formulations. Tablets that are too big are crushed, and liquids that are too concentrated are diluted. There is very little information on how such reformulation affects bioavailability and there is an increased risk of overdosing…

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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