5 ms·
We should be skeptical of them. Though, very few of us have the knowledge, expertise, or resources to do so effectively. Better to pool our resources and create
by mumblemumble 5y ago
We should be skeptical of them. Though, very few of us have the knowledge, expertise, or resources to do so effectively. Better to pool our resources and create an organization to handle that for us.
It's not a perfect system, but the general trend over time has been for it to get better. One of the great ironies here is that, the better the FDA gets at finding problems, the more people criticize it for not finding problems. It's so difficult to consistently remember the full implications of the principle that absence of evidence is not, in and of itself, evidence of absence.
This case is particularly interesting because it happened immediately before the Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act of 2007, which included a considerable strengthening of the US's preregistration requirements. This clamped down on a way that pharmaceutical companies game the system that the general public, and even the majority of doctors, is ill-equipped to even understand, let alone push back against.
Granted, that act didn't, I don't think, include anything specifically about off-label usage. So it's somewhat tangential to the issue in question. I'm more trying to point out the shape of the situation. It's sort of a game of 4D chess, and, if one side were to be playing it in a purely "Twitch plays Pokémon" fashion, it would be at a severe disadvantage.
- briefcomment 5y agoI think one reasonable and effective way to act in this sort of complexity is to reduce your dependency on pharmaceuticals as much as possible. It may not be doable for some, but those that can stay healthy while avoiding pharmaceuticals are likely to be better off.
- mumblemumble 5y agoThere's an almost solipsistic angle to that. "I'm young and healthy so I'm gonna just check out of the situation," only works for as long as you can remain young and healthy. As soon as that stops being the case - which could be any day now - you might find yourself being much more personally interested in having an effective system for getting new treatments onto the market while maintaining reasonable standards of safety and efficacy.
- briefcomment 5y agoAvoiding drugs doesn't require you to give up on the system. You can avoid drugs and act to make the system better.