It's because the drugs themselves prove ineffective, unsafe or both. Statements like this prove the systemic abuse of statistics that is pharma regulation. Yo

It's because the drugs themselves prove ineffective, unsafe or both. Statements like this prove the systemic abuse of statistics that is pharma regulation. You've - quite unconsciously, no doubt - reversed the definition of proof, asserting that failure to prove a positive is equivalent to proving a negative. Of course you don't believe this. But your institutional jargon automatically generates the lie. Orwell had a point. Today's viable drug is a survivor in a winnowing process in which any of a thousand screwups - often mere failures of trial design - can kill it. Moreover, while some of these are corporate errors (not the drug's fault), many of the design failures are institutional and uncorrectable. For instance, testing cancer drugs of the "magic bullet" type against late-stage tumors is utterly ridiculous, as these genetic Cthulhus are the last place anything targeted is likely to work on. But this is the only place our testing paradigm is viable. The drunk looks under the lamppost for his keys, again and again. Advanced genotyping might reveal that a certain tumor has five pathways for evading apoptosis. Five different molecules are needed to shut them all down. In an individual trial, each molecule fails. It thus - to use your language - "proves ineffective." We are past the days that you can find compounds that mold poops out, and use it to cure 90% of humanity's ailments. It's a commonplace assertion that most of these older compounds (certainly aspirin and penicillin) would fail an early toxicity screen and never get close to a mouse, let alone a patient. I have no idea whether this is true. But if it is, Western medicine is objectively in the same position as NASA: it can no longer do the things it did 40 years ago. Welcome to Trantor.