Seeking to replace Warfarin as a blood thinner, Duke Clinical Research Institute ran a trial that ended with approval of the drug Xarelto. However, later the blood testing device malfunctioned. Duke did further tests and published a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine saying that the problems with the machine did not affect the trial results. The data from these results would have allowed a comparison with the device’s readings, but were suppressed. Meanwhile, 5000 lawsuits have emerged that claim patients have been harmed by Xarelto, and the European Medicines Agency found the machine to be highly inaccurate. This case has caused a change in the way that journal articles are published. Authors are now required to disclose their outside financial interests and the role drug companies, in this case Johnson & Johson and Bayer, played in the articles’ publication.
Can we trust these drugs and the companies who sell them, and, in America, pour mega-dollars into TV advertising? I myself am taking a certain drug, and only found out on the internet that it is implicated in damage to kidneys, bone fracture and even memory loss. Yes, you have to make a judgment as to whether the beneficial effects of a drug on an immediate medical condition outweigh the possible side effects, but it makes you wonder whether it’s worth taking anything at all. The old saying holds: caveat emptor.
The cost of pharmaceuticals can be ridiculously high, even for drugs developed twenty or thirty years ago. It is one thing in Europe, where there is only effectively one purchaser per nation (the National Health Service in the UK); the monopoly buyer in this case has real power, and this is just what American Big Pharma fears and spends money on resisting at all costs (“socialised medicine”).
No, in my opinion we cannot. blindly trust the pharmaceutical industry. The profit motive seems to come first before the health of the public. The horrendous spread of opioid dependency, which is doing untold damage in the US, is a case in point. Actions taken by the industry to limit the problem have been too little, too late. “Free enterprise” run riot.
( The writer used to work for an international pharmaceutical company. At the time the industry referred to itself as “the ethical pharmaceutical industry”. I guess most of it was ethical at the time, or tried to be, although salesmen offering business gifts to doctors always seemed to me to be a dubious practice. Today, the ethics of the industry seem ever more muddied).