It definitely should be, because medical information is vitally important for your health. It is often taken for granted, that every piece of medical information is honest and reliable. That is what I thought for many years since I entered a medical school, and continued to believe for many years. But not any more.
Recently I learned that the primary source of medical information can be from whom do you think? Ghost writers! Who apparently know better about medicine than doctors and researchers!? You think I’m joking, but I’m not.
According to the article published in the New York Times:
Drug maker Wyeth Pharmaceutical, well known for his complaint to FDA about bioidentical hormones, hired ghost writers to concoct articles favorable to its drug Prempro even after discovering the fact, that this drug increases the risk for breast cancer. I’m not surprised about a drug company’s tricks. What I’m surprised about, is that the FDA approved Prempro with its increased breast cancer rates and banned bioidentical Estriol with no known side effects!
Do you have explanation of this fact? I think you do.
FDA approved asthma drugs were found risky
Some drugs are good, some are medicore at best and some are no good. There is nothing wrong with this. 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 Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 1:52 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.
