Celebrex and Vioxx

Let's talk about those big bad drug companies...

Now with every drug there is a risk/reward issue. The question is always does the risk outweigh the reward. Aspirin for instance thins the blood which helps people with heart trouble but can lead to problems with troublesome bleeding if taken in high doses or by people with bleeding ulcers etc.

Now the Celebrex issue shows that heart attack risk increases when you take the highest recommended dose (400mg) or up to two times the highest recommended dose (800MG). This fact is of course buried in the end of articles that bother to mention it, and others don't even bother to mention it.

Now if you want all the studies to be completed on a drug before it hits the markets then you have to change the way the drug patent process works. Once the patent is filed the clock starts ticking. Typically a drug company gets 5-10 years of a 20 year patent life to have exclusive rights to sell a drug they developed. This does not allow enough time to do long term clinical trials to truly judge the effectiveness vs. safety of a drug.

But then what about all those people who could have benefited from the drug during the time it was being studied for approval.

Sure the drug companies are out to make a profit. But they are also out to help people because if their drugs don't help people who is going to buy them?

Disclaimer - both my wife and I work for drug companies developing therapies and diagnostics for heart and cancer patients. But of course, if the "chicken little" media elite and ambulance chasing litigators have their way, our companies will both go bankrupt and neither of our research projects will ever help any one.