5 ms·
Why should I expect the FDA to be more reliable than the drug companies?
by baddox 11y ago
Why should I expect the FDA to be more reliable than the drug companies?
- protomyth 11y agoWell, that's a trust the government debate, but I worked at one of the third-parties and they did a pretty damn fine job of it. Their reputation was pretty important to them. I was astounded by the cost in a study. Thousands of samples overnighted to the lab with multiple tests run on each. The bill for that alone is staggering.
- asavadatti 11y agoSo in your hierarchy of trust the drug companies are the least trustworthy, the FDA is slightly more trustworthy and random unnamed people are the most trustworthy?
- baddox 11y agoI haven't decided on a hierarchy. I asked why I should expect the FDA to be more reliable than the drug companies.
- clarky07 11y agobecause they aren't for profit? their only reason for existing at all is to keep harmful things from being approved for sale. I'm by no means saying the FDA is perfect or infallible, far from it. Just that it's super easy to rank them above the drug companies in reliability as to a drugs safety and efficacy.
- baddox 11y agoI don't see why profit incentive is obviously a worse way to get reliability than the incentives of politicians and FDA employees.
- brazzledazzle 11y agoDoes every thread have to devolve into a debate about the merits of libertarianism?
- Natsu 11y agoYou shouldn't trust any of them to begin with, but rather grade them on their accomplishments (e.g. eradication of polio). Similarly, you should also have approximately zero trust in anecdotes about unnamed people when making medical decisions. Or so I heard from some person who I believe to be reliable. Way more reliable than the others.
- baddox 11y agoThe trouble with grading people or groups on their accomplishments is that it's only useful if you're evaluating net accomplishments. If, for instance, whoever is responsible for preventing lots of deaths from polio also caused more deaths for other reasons (obviously I'm not suggesting this is the case; it's only an example), I might still be hesitant to trust them.
- Natsu 11y agoI wouldn't suggest otherwise, but there's a lot of publicly available research for interested parties to examine - http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/201/11/1607.full http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/201/11/1607.full