Stats for nerds
3recommend
23mentions
11people
2007–2022years
26% recommend61% neutral13% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The US pharmaceutical industry is too wealthy for that to be workable. The game is to make friends while working at the FDA, and then to cash in. In order to serve the public interest, drug discovery and testing ought to occur in academia. The pharmaceutical industry should play no role in that, and should merely manufacture approved drugs.
Edit: Please see The Truth About Drug Companies, by Marcia Angell, M.D., formerly an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.
- > If the current standard of care is a drug and you test against it, aren't you showing it's more effective?
The main issue is that a drug can be more effective than an older drug but still be less effective than taking no drug at all.
But given all the problems, both theoretical and practical, with current drug trials, there is pretty much no guarantee of anything. Just because something makes sense on paper doesn't mean that it's actually true. There are a number of books about the issues with drug trials... Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre, The Truth About Drug Companies by Marcia Angell, Overdosed America, etc. All of these books cover largely different issues, so imho it's worth reading them all.
- "Citations? This is a pretty big claim for a FDA-approved drug that was the most profitable drug on the market as of 2011."
There are a bunch of books about this that you can get on Amazon. A good one I read is Overdosed America. But if you search on Amazon for 'statin' there are a lot more books that are specifically about this.
"A quick literature search found Lipitor to be more efficacious[3] (Double blinded, placebo controlled, n = 1049)."
The academic literature generally isn't a reliable source for information about pharmaceutical drugs, unless it's one of the NIH trials or another trial sponsored by an independent entity. The only way to get accurate information from trials sponsored by pharma companies is to FOIA the FDA, unless the raw data is on clinicaltrials.gov which it almost never is. There are again a number of books that explain why this is, I personally like both Overdosed America (again) and also Marcia Angell's book The Truth About Drug Companies. I'm sure Ben Goldacre's new book probably covers the same stuff though.
"eep in mind that, as with all drugs, both are dose-dependent and have unpleasant side-effects when taken in combination with certain drugs, foods, and certain patient populations, such as pregnant women and those with liver disease."
Plant-based medicines tend to be fairly forgiving about dosage. E.g. you're probably not going to get sick from eating any reasonably amount of oyster mushrooms, at least as long as they're fresh and you cook them properly.
- The former head editor of NEJM wrote a book called The Truth About Drug Companies that describes it in good detail. Also the book The Emperors New Drugs and the book Overdosed America. The first is about phase 4 trials, the other books cover more general issues with phase 1-3 trials not getting published.
- I mean about half the problems you could get rid of just by cleaning up all the corruption in pharma and the FDA. The two books I've read that both have some pretty good stats and recommendations on this are:
The Truth About Drug Companies by Marcia Angell
Overdosed America by John Abramson
The problems are way too numerous to list, but they're extremely important.
The second thing that needs to change is that we need more data about the state of health care, as well as unbiased research into drugs. The commonwealth fund makes the case that we actually do a decent job of improving at the things we measure, but for the vast majority of the healthcare system we have no idea how safe or effective it is.
The third thing is that medicine needs to actually be regulated like any other industry. Doctors in this country are basically given a free pass for killing people, and that needs to change.
And lastly, as you say, our education system needs to be fixed. It doesn't work to have a society where only 3% of Americans can actually read at the level that college graduates are supposed to be able to read at.
Oh, and all of this needs to be done by the government, or by a combination of government and NGOs. Having private companies do healthcare is a disaster.
- While I agree that certain alternative therapy based funding agencies aren't exactly an optimized system (funding energy waves? ESP? etc.) Big Pharma has its own brand of brokenness.
I read this book, and found it quite eye opening. I haven't checked up on everything that I read about, but the things I did look into were consistent with the claims...
http://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Drug-Companies-Deceive/dp/...
