Strangely, a letter to the Lancet from a group of scientists, and an early day motion in Parliament calling for more human-based as opposed to animal-based testing of drugs, has gone fairly unn0ticed in the news. If I hadn’t just stumbled onto Sky News yesterday, I think I’d have missed it entirely.
The call is based on some pretty disturbing statistics –
Adverse drug reactions have reached epidemic proportions and are increasing at twice the rate of prescriptions.The European Commission estimated in 2008 that adverse reactions kill 197 000 EU citizens annually, at a cost of €79 billion. The cost of new medicines is rising unsustainably, creating an ever-increasing burden on the National Health Service (NHS). Meanwhile, many increasingly prevalent diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, many cancers, and stroke, remain without adequate treatments. The major reason for the rising cost of new drugs is the fact that more than 90% of them fail in clinical trials
In the UK alone it’s reckoned that it costs £2 billion a year to treat patients suffering from adverse drug reactions.
However, the problem isn’t just that drugs are likely to produce different effects in humans from other animals. RCTs aren’t the best way to demonstrate harms. In fact, most harms from drugs don’t become apparent until they are actually used in large numbers of human beings (think if Thalidomide for one such memorable example).
Even if we could filter out drugs which cause a lot of harm, we still need to find ways to prescribe less drugs. As Ray Moynihan pointed out in last week’s BMJ, the evidence base for drugs is terribly corrupted by drug company funded research and publications –
In our collective zeal to summarise, we have too often ignored the fact that a vast and growing proportion of those original studies are industry sponsored, which means that they tend to exaggerate benefits and play down harms. Summarising that bias doesn’t make it go away. Medicine’s prized evidence base has become debased.
Maybe it’s time we worked harder to return to “first do no harm”.
Heroes Not Zombies 
[…] are just too many drugs being prescribed. Too many, too carelessly, and too easily. Add to this the toll from Adverse Drug Reactions, and the rapidly escalating drugs bills of all health services, and isn’t it about time we […]
How can you give a drug, when the art of taking the case has been lost?
Shorten the time that the practioner has to take the case,and the consequence is, to shorthen the life of the patient.
Return the good care that once the Medical Practice had.They did not have all the new fangle medications and machines, but had the art of listening to the patient.
There is a need now for politicians and pharmecutical companies to stay right out of manipulating medicine, and return it to its original function, of the compassionate healing of the sick.