The cat is out of the Food & Drug Administration’s bag: the media is reporting that only around 50% of drugs approved as safe for Americans to take were ever submitted to comparative effectiveness testing at the time of their approval by the FDA, and approximately 75% of these new drugs had this information available where alternative treatment options existed.
This information was revealed in an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), appearing in its May 4, 2011 issue: Nikolas H. Goldberg, Sebastian Schneeweiss, Mary K. Kowal, Joshua J. Gagne. Availability of Comparative Efficacy Data at the Time of Drug Approval in the United States. JAMA, 2011; 305 (17): 1786-1789 DOI: 10.1001/jama.2011.539.
What does this mean?
As the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International points out this week in an article from Natural News entitled, “FDA approved Big Pharma drugs without effective data,” the FDA approved a huge (HUGE) amount of drugs for all of us to trust and take when they didn’t have the proper data to support that decision, specificially “comparative effectiveness data.”
Comparative effective data, the article explains, compares the new drug against other treatments to determine which is best. Which is safer? Which works best? In other words, is the Big Pharma drug the best one for the particular problem that the person is experiencing?
If that hints that profit would be impacted by this, you’re right.
