Just noticed this on the side of a medicine bottle that I used tonight.
(context: My 4 year-old has a cold coming on)
The bottle is clearly marked "Children's Dry Coughs - 2 to 12 years"
"WARNING: MAY CAUSE DROWSINESS. IF AFFECTED DO NOT DRIVE OR OPERATE MACHINERY. AVOID ALCOHOL".
I can tell you I won't be letting him drive tonight to the construction site where he works with the other alcoholic 4-year olds.
Doesn't anybody read these labels before this stuff is shipped out to stores?
4 comments:
People who are very litigant aware,and like most big corporations big pharma is run by lawyers.
Example:
TEN TIMES DIABETES incident with Zyprexa users
Zyprexa, the best- selling schizophrenia remedy from Eli Lilly & Co., with $4.2 billion in sales last year.
Zyprexa was the best-selling schizophrenia treatment in the second-quarter and had the sixth-highest sales of any prescription drug worldwide, bringing in $1.1 billon in the quarter
Should you take ZYPREXA? What are the Risk?
Zyprexa (Olanzapine) is Lilly's largest seller. It used to be the first-place atypical antipsychotic in the U.S. but has dropped to third. This is probably because doctors and patients have learned, through the NIH CATIE study and through thousands of lawsuits, that it has the most dangerous side effects of all the drugs in its class.
It causes diabetes, hyperglycemia, and death. 8000 plaintiffs settled with Lilly in 2005 and are still waiting for payment.
Many states have sued Lilly for alleged fraud, for not revealing its side effects, and for compensation to their state's Medicaid programs for the costs of the drug as well as the costs involved in caring for people who got such conditions as diabetes from the drug.
Lilly has also been charged with alleged fraud in off-label marketing of the drug for children.
Many individual lawsuits remain outstanding and will begin to be heard once the 8000 plaintiff suit has been finalized. Lilly states that it will "vigorously defend" itself against these individual lawsuits, but a number of them are for death allegedly caused by this drug
---
Daniel Haszard Bangor Maine zyprexa-victims.com
The scary thing is that warning label was probably specifically written due to a lawsuit. "What do you mean, I can't let my child drive while using this medication? No one told me that!"
I am conflicted about big pharma. I interviewed with a big biotech company that develops and manufacturs many medications for many disorders, and without big pharma we'd all be screwed.
The flip side is that the studies they perform to determine efficacy and side effects (at least in the US) only require that the drug behave better than a placebo, and the studies are often terminated early because they don't want to run the risk of identifying long-term side effects (long-term being relative - most studies don't go over 6 to 12 months). There are even cases of data from later in the study being excluded due to unwanted side effects popping up.
It really is on the consumer/patient to educate themselves when it comes to drugs - your doctor oftentimes prescribes what the big pharma sales rep has pushed, and if your doctor prescribes enough then your doctor might get a reward (for example, a free cruise).
The devil's advocate side of me (and the biochemist) argues that it takes approximately 800 million dollars from an idea's conception to market the drug, and that does not include advertising. That said, how can a company be expected to front the money on risky ideas or little-known (aka third-world) diseases, and how can they expect recoup their investment without high drug prices? It's a tough balance.
The third-world diseases are not studied in the US by big pharma because third-world countries couldn't afford to pay the cost of the potential medication - it's just silly that we've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a male impotency drug and we spend millions on male-pattern baldness but we can't study malaria or the related parasitic diseases...
Ah - don't get me started!
Wow. This is BIG. I am so trusting about stuff like this and usually take the advice of the pharmacist or doctor when they tell me I need to take some drug or other.
I have noticed though in recent times that pharmacists tend to be guessing about medications that "might" be useful when I have some ailment or other and when I ask them to clarify the difference between one product or another they have no clue how to explain.
There sure seems to be an element of influence from the sales reps from these companies to sell or promote one brand over another and I completely relate to the unease over incentivizing (is that a real word?) pharmacists or doctors to recommend one product in favour of another.
Did you all hear about the poor unfortunate guys in the UK who agreed to participate in trials for an anti-inflammatory drug. These guys were not paid very much to participate and the consequences were horrendous. One guy was in the newspaper last weekend saying he thinks he might be dead within a year.
The worst thing is nobody seems to know why exactly they suffered the terrible reactions they did.
check it out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGN1412
Brought to you by the "Warning! Coffee is hot" people.
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