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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18194

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

Studdert DM, Mello MM, Brennan TA
Medical Monitoring for Pharmaceutical Injuries - Tort Law for the Public's Health?
JAMA 2003 Feb 19; 289:(7):889
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/289/7/889


Abstract:

A remarkable development in personal injury litigation in recent years involves attempts to expand legal claims beyond existing injuries to anticipated future harms. Attorneys have begun to sue on behalf of individuals exposed to defective pharmaceutical products who have no current injury, but who may be at risk for developing one after a latency period. This strategy seeks to make drug manufacturers pay for medical monitoring, a court-ordered program that provides diagnostic tests to exposed individuals to facilitate early detection of adverse health effects. Because medical monitoring does not depend on the existence of an actual injury and large populations may be exposed, some commentators have warned that it has the potential to spiral out of control. We examine medical monitoring in the context of 2 major cases involving diet drugs and an oral hypoglycemic drug. We conclude that this expansion of tort law should be applied sparingly, but that the performance of courts to date in these cases gives cause for optimism. Judges appear to be paying close attention to sophisticated epidemiological, clinical, and cost-effectiveness considerations. Medical monitoring arms the courts with a new mechanism for addressing harms proactively rather than reactively, which could yield new victories for public health.

 

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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