That is why we have a regulatory agency, run by the US government, called FDA, to separate good drugs from bad drugs. So good ones should be approved by the FDA, and the bad ones should be rejected. That is how it should be. But in real life it is sometimes opposite to what it should be.
Do you remember the Vioxx scandal? Sure you do. A small mistake: the FDA approved a pain killer that causes heart attacks! How many people are using Vioxx? Millions. And at the same time, the FDA banned estriol, which even as per the FDA guidelines, has no proven adverse effects. Another small mistake: the FDA approved the drug Aprotinine, which was found to increase mortality. In plain English it means this: it was killing people. How many patients received Aprorinine? Hundreds of thousands.
Now some other news: two asthma drugs were found risky: Serevent and Foradil. By whom do you think? By practicing physicians? No. By independent experts? No. By patients? No. They were found risky by the FDA’s own expert panel. My question is this: can we trust the FDA? I think you know the answer.
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This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 3:44 pm and is filed under General health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
