a new drug battle is brewing

[lil-petunia]

Last week, 11 medical journals announced that they would no longer suger coat the facts and figures presented by drug companies in support of their new product releases. Either the magazines and journals got ALL the information or they would no publish.

For those even remotely in the field, you can understand what a massive shift in policy this is.

The battle has not stopped there. In a really nasty congressional hearing last Thursday, the companies "New and Improved" position on information release is that giving up too much data would confuse the patient and the doctor. Oh, confusion. My, my. Can't let that happen, now can we? We should rely only on what the good company tells us.

Translated into english, the big legal drug dealers in this country do not want you to know that, for example, anti-depressants have been known to cause suicides in about 1.9% of all patients, with a huge cluster in young and middle aged women, and another among 50+ men. That means if you are female, 25, and taking these classes of drugs, six users out of every hundred are at severe risk of being driven to suicide. 6 out of 100. Deaths. And they have known this for a decade. But they sat on the information.

And these these were the drugs intended to cure or treat your depression, not cause even more problems!

What these drug dealers want is to go back to the good old days, picking only the studies that show efficacy, safety and postive cost-benefit ratios. They do NOT want to let you know that most of the time, the drugs don't work as portrayed, or that the studies were done mainly on male blacks in prison, meaning that a post-hysterectomy oriental female may react totally differently to the same dose. Nor do they want to tell you about synergetic, possibly toxic reactions, deaths, side-effects and other problems that crop up in those pesky studies they like to sit on.

At the same time, (and this really burns my ass) these same drug dealers are pushing for immunity from the federal government. At least 4 bills are sitting in Congress, ready for discussion and debate, each of which would give drug companies a level of immunity for certain classes of drugs they deal, even though many have side effects that will damage or kill you.

What is that jewish term? Chutzpah? (sp??)

there is a pretty decent report on some of these issues at
http://www.cnn.com/2004/HEALTH/conditions/09/10/antidepressants.children.ap/index.html

Also, Nature, JAMA and American Scientist have some good stories either online, or soon to be online.

[Warpy]

1. Health care professionals have always known about the suicide

risk with antidepressants, and it's not just the newer classes of them. Drugs that have been used for decades to treat major depression also have a risk of suicide, not from the drugs, but from the fact that when a profoundly depressed patient starts to feel more energetic, s/he occasionaly will turn that energy to acting out plans for suicide to end the pain permanently. In other words, there's a window of increased energy while the patient is still in severe pain when suicide is not only an attractive end, it's also possible.

That's nothing new, in other words.

More troubling is the fact that the newer class of antidepressants hasn't tested any better than placebo, yet all have potentially devastating side effecs, especially on libido. That's the information the drug companies suppressed, and it's probably the main reason for the policy shift at the journals.

[Hubert Flottz]

2. Those will all pass if Bushco wins!

That's depressing!

[Nikia]

3. I have had bad side effects with several drugs

One of these drugs, I almost died from. Others, they were making me iller than I had been without it. Most of the drug information says a lot of these side effects are relatively rare. I know that I may be more sensitive to side effects compared to most, but I wonder how accurate that information is. What makes 5-20% of people get unpleasant side effects to a drug that is supposed to help them? Is the effect really a general effect of the drug that more people relly get to a smaller extent? If only a certain percentage of people get negative effects of the drug, does it mean that only a certain percent get the positive effects of a drug. Now that I think about it, most drug ads do not give success rates.

[lil-petunia]

4. But when Bushco see the following equation

money - public safety


Just one guess on which side of the scales they place their thumbs.

Hey anyone know where Kerry stands on medical marijuana?
there was a HUGE finding in the UK showing that Marijuana causes measurable MEASUREABLE positive benefits to sufferes of Multiple Sclerosis.

I saw an e-mail on that from New Scientist. I'll add the site here in a bit.