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Disease Modifying Drugs & Therapies

 

 

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If you have experienced any adverse side effects from a medication or therapy - Report it

Some disease modifying drugs work to change the course of a disease - others to address the symptoms

It is well recognised that all drugs take a long time to be developed, the process takes the drug / compound / idea / along a path of multiple research - testing - trials eventually culminating in a phase three trial prior to licensing and submission for use. Phase three trials are considered to be the gold standard that demonstrates the safety and efficacy of a drug. However, there lies a record of drugs being withdraw after demonstrating adverse side effects even though they have passed through the phase three trial gold standard?

 

Perhaps safety and efficacy may be better served if a drug was assessed, not only from phase three trial results and peer review, additional considerations could also be given to information / data obtained from anecdotal evidence and single case studies?

 

You are capable of making an informed decision, and it is vital that you understand what you are taking before you take it. Why would you assume doctors know everything?

 

New drug development collaboration                                                                                                                                                                                     

Collaboration in more meaningful ways in the pharmaceutical industry could carry research and development forward further and faster, shared knowledge, resources and finances would lead to meaningful and constructive research paths being followed with greater efficiency being achieved, leading to growth in research productivity instead of decline.

 

The opportunity to expand research and development even further and faster may be by way of collaboration between the pharmaceutical industry and public research institutions, universities. The sharing of expertise would lower costs and reduce the time taken for a successful drug / treatment to become available. Lowering the cost and reducing the time taken would be reflected in the end price of such drugs/ treatments, making them available to a wider patient base, especially amongst poor people.

 

The Internet is sometimes used to profit on the back of peoples / patients lack of information. A whole industry has sprung up bringing counterfeit drugs onto the market. The ease of communicating over the Internet greatly adds to the problem. This can only undermine confidence in bona-fide drugs. Governments ought to look at these issues for the benefit of easing disease and disorder throughout the world, and making treatment affordable, not just for those who can pay.

 

The risk / benefit analysis can work both ways.

One of our concerns is that apparently effective therapies for serious conditions may be delayed or even halted by the regulations which are supposed to protect us, to the point of leading to numbers of deaths of the very public they are supposed to be safeguarding.

 

This is a conundrum which has strong arguments on both sides - the public must be protected from ineffective or dangerous treatments but then again do not the individuals whose very lives are at risk from their conditions deserve a particular right to be able to try new medicines, especially if this is decided upon in a humane and ethical manner.  Do they not also have the right to disclaim others from culpable responsibility?

 

 

 

Other Reading

1. Abramson, John, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine. How pharmaceutical companies distort medical knowledge, mislead doctors and compromise your health, Harper Perennial, 2005
2. Angell, Marcia, The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do about It, Random House, 2004
3. Deyo, Richard and Donald Patrick, Hope or Hype – The Obsession with Medical Advances and the High Cost of False Promises, Amacom, 2005
4. Healy, David, Let Them Eat Prozac, New York University Press, 2004
5. Kassirer, Jerome P., On the Take: How Medicine’s Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health, Oxford University Press, 2005
6. Law, Jacky, Big Pharma: How the World’s Biggest Drug Companies Market Illness, Constable & Robinson, 2006
7. Medawar, C. and A. Hardon, Medicines Out of Control? Antidepressants and the Conspiracy of Goodwill, Askant, 2004. Available from www.socialaudit.org.uk/
   60403162.htm
8. Moynihan, Ray and Alan Cassels, Selling Sickness: How Drug Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients, Allen & Unwin, 2005
9. Servan-Schreiber, David, Healing without Freud or Prozac: Natural Approaches to Curing Stress, Anxiety and Depression Without Drugs, Rodale International Ltd, 2004
10. Walker, Martin J., Dirty Medicine, Slingshot Publications, 1993
11. Walker, Martin J., and Robert Schweizer, HRT Licensed to Kill and Maim: The Unheard Voices of Women Damaged by Hormone Replacement Therapy, Slingshot Publications, 2006
12. Walker, Martin J., ‘The Brave New World of Zero Risk: Covert Strategies in British Science Policy’, downloadable from www.zero-risk.org

 

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