The drugs don't work: a modern medical scandal
- Thread starter Raoh
- Start date
is this why my hayfever tablets never work?they don't even touch it lol
Then change tablets.
Not every drug works on every person. That's why different tablets have different active ingredients and if over the counter stuff doesn't work, go see GP, they have a much bigger range available.
is this why my hayfever tablets never work?
do you take them "as needed" or do you use them as directed 1-2 weeks before hay fever season starts as they take quite a while to knock the levels down so you need to take them before hay fever starts.
Kenai on the one time fix option being withheld, when was the last time you had small pox?
Soldato
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I take it you haven't read Ben Goldacre's book Bad Science. This already deals with how bad government is a doing proper clinical trials. It also covers "Bad Pharma".
Looking forward to reading his new book as it focuses on the more interesting points raised in his first book.
Ar the man who prescribed said drug after reviewing the literature and understanding it and discussing it with the patient.
Ar the man who then acknowledges that people reviewed the research and found the wrong conclusions were drawn.
Hmmm ... so I guess he didn't read it and understand it as he stated.
Ar the man who then acknowledges that people reviewed the research and found the wrong conclusions were drawn.
Hmmm ... so I guess he didn't read it and understand it as he stated.
My understanding is that part of the problem is that they don't - they rely on data gathered by others. Any large-scale analysis done tends to be retrospective, not before introduction. Even then results can be hushed up because the NHS doesn't want to be sued.
No, the NHS does it. Case in point was the thread about a cancer drug, where the NHS stopped the trials early and gave th drug to everyone as it was deemed to be unfair to withhold it from the group on the old drug.
Or Polio - both of which have been largely (if not completely) removed from the wild in most countries as the vaccine was effective, the virus didn't mutate much at all naturally, and the governments of the world have largely put a massive effort into getting the vaccines to pretty much everyone who might ever come in contact with them.
Vaccines are a great example of "big pharma" disproving the myth that they'd rather sell a treatment, than a full on cure or prevention.
Where the condition doesn't mutate in general the mass application of vaccines can wipe it out.
Unfortunately things like the common cold are really a huge number of different mutations of the same virus family, so any vaccine wouldn't work for most of them (iirc it's one of the reasons you tend to get less colds as you grow up, as you build up a resistance to the ones you've previously been exposed to).
Essentially the problem lies in that clinical trials must only prove that a drug works better than placebo aka nothing.
If the ethics committees behind approval of these individual clinical trials were to be more strict in approval (which I was told in a recent work conference is starting to be the case) then what should follow is more rejections of trials of 'Drug A vs placebo' and instead approval of 'Drug A vs the gold standard treatment'.
If the ethics committees behind approval of these individual clinical trials were to be more strict in approval (which I was told in a recent work conference is starting to be the case) then what should follow is more rejections of trials of 'Drug A vs placebo' and instead approval of 'Drug A vs the gold standard treatment'.
Which is exactly what does occur in most cases. Does this improve on our current way of doing things.
which assumes that all patients respond to all drugs equally.
there is no "gold standard" drug for many applications as one patient will not respond to it but another will respond excellently.
A) NHS does that sort of
b) why take it to that level, why does a new drug need to beat the "gold standard". You do realize different drugs have different success rates, but while dug b might only have a 20% success rate, compared to 60% for drug A, drug b works on patients where drug A doesn't.
More and more work is looking at genetics and things like different variations of cancer and other dieseas. To better understand why drugs work on some and not other and trying to predict which drug will be successful and as such make a much more target approach.
Therefore drug trials should only be done against placebo to start with. You need to know it works. This is not a bad thing at all.
Soldato
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ITT a bunch of keyboard jockeys dispute a trained professionals opinion who is probably 1000x harder working and smarter than them.
That actually works in the pharmaceutical companies favour and is why many trials are actually conducted like that. It's not a great way of conducting trials because the current treatments the candidate drug is being compared to may in themselves be ineffective (at least in that population group). Candidate drug vs placebo is less likely to result in a successful approval because if response rates in both groups are the same the drug will not be approved whereas in the former scenario the drug will be approved. Placebo vs active treatment vs candidate treatment is the best type of trial and many are already done this way. One also needs to consider that just because a drug is less effective at producing a response in a given population than the current gold standard (where one exists), does not mean that it would not be a beneficial addition to the therapeutic arsenal due to differing drug responses.
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Modern?
Medicine scandals have been around since the start of the proto-science (Alchemy).
It means very little, the only difference today is that because it is a definite science now and the existence of capitalism, things become more difficult to assess.
People still work at these places, they probably have family members with currently incurable diseases, so they have reason to cure it.
However it is about profit at the end of the day, one must practice logic in this instance.
What i would be far more worried about is if these companies have secret divisions where they test, in "unorthodox" ways, which is highly likely considering the amount of advancement we got from the rather disgusting acts done in the Japanese Research Units and Nazi Concentration Camps.
Since there is nothing to prove of such things, probable existence is they will be.
Medicine scandals have been around since the start of the proto-science (Alchemy).
It means very little, the only difference today is that because it is a definite science now and the existence of capitalism, things become more difficult to assess.
People still work at these places, they probably have family members with currently incurable diseases, so they have reason to cure it.
However it is about profit at the end of the day, one must practice logic in this instance.
What i would be far more worried about is if these companies have secret divisions where they test, in "unorthodox" ways, which is highly likely considering the amount of advancement we got from the rather disgusting acts done in the Japanese Research Units and Nazi Concentration Camps.
Since there is nothing to prove of such things, probable existence is they will be.
i know i've gone through
loratadine
cetirizine
levocetirizine
chlorphenamine
fexofenadine
montelukast
my docs out of ideas and just recycles them, none of them work at all and i take them properly, went though the nasal sprays, eye drops, herbal stuff, some qu-chi armband and a red light you stick up your nose for 3 minutes too and he won't let me have the injection.
and nothing touches it
I like Ben G. It's hard work watching him present things though.
He's probably correct about most of the things that he writes about (and draws light on to some important things, i.e. 'missing' (read: hidden) trials) but then again he does have a book to sell so sensationalist writing is useful.
He's probably correct about most of the things that he writes about (and draws light on to some important things, i.e. 'missing' (read: hidden) trials) but then again he does have a book to sell so sensationalist writing is useful.