Beware of new drugs

New prescription drugs have a one in five chance of causing serious reactions after they have been approved. For this reason, expert physicians recommend not taking new drugs unless they have been on the market for at least five years. It takes that long to determine whether they are safe.

What’s more, most of the new drugs offer few advantages over old ones. Independent reviews by expert teams in France, Canada, and the Netherlands have concluded that of the 946 new products released between 2002 and 2010, only two were breakthroughs and 13 represented a real therapeutic advance. The remaining 85 to 89 percent of the new drugs offered little or no clinical advantage. And yet these new drugs continue to flood the market.

The reason that new drugs offer few advantages over old ones is that companies just tinker a bit with their existing drugs, then begin pushing these “new drugs.” (I read about one man who pried the coating off a “new” drug to find the old drug underneath. The “improvement” was merely the coating.) Nevertheless, their sales and profits are soaring, largely as a result of raising prices and getting more physicians to prescribe more drugs. Naturally, the new drugs are far more costly than the drugs they replace.

To make sure that the new drugs show some benefit, the companies design their clinical trials with the marketing departments. Scholarly studies have shown that they design the trials in a way that skew the results and distort the evidence by selective reporting or biased interpretation. The FDA accepts these biased trials and uses them to approve drugs. By the way, the FDA receives fees from the drug companies. In 2010, these fees amounted to $529,276, 543. I guess it makes sense for them to charge a fee; but it makes you wonder. 

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