The piece, which reviews three books, is also a nice, concise overview of several other drug-related issues we may remember from previous reading, including:
- incompletely revealed study results, where write-ups of negative results are unlikely to be published and positive ones may be written to make a drug seem more effective;
- promoting drugs for off-label uses for which they haven't been proven to be effective;
- highlighting vaguely-defined ailments like social anxiety disorder as serious and requiring medication;
- advertising directly to consumers to convince them they need particular drugs.
Even the hallowed DSM is based more on "a complex of academic politics, personal ambition, ideology, and, perhaps most important, the influence of the pharmaceutical industry" than on hard evidence.
It doesn't even talk about the much-lamented high cost of prescription drugs and how that could be tied into the promotion of new medications of generics and all that. But let's just sum up thusly:
Drugs: a Complex Issue. (I also considered Drugs: Gimme Some!)
The article is rather disheartening, concluding that
It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines
but it's a good read. Well, I'm off to fling my prescriptions out the window.
No comments:
Post a Comment