In the 1980s when I started my private practice in internal medicine, drug reps came to my door every day promoting their newest products.
Every time they brought a new drug for me to try out on my patients, they brought along scientific studies to support their case and encourage me to use the new drugs as better and more likely to help my patients than the competition or older drugs with the same action.
While initially I did listen and read the data, it didn't take long until I figured out that new drugs, even though all FDA approved, have no long term data on their safety or efficacy. It takes a long time and a lot of users to determine the truth about any drug.
At that point in my growth as a physician and human being I vowed that I would not jump on the new drug bandwagon so fast. I would give a new drug only under circumstances that required its use and an old comparable drug that was proven safe could not be found. If I was treating under emergency circumstances, the patient was terminal or the drug was useful in extremely specialized areas of care.
Since most of my patients are somewhere in the middle, mostly healthy and trying to stay well, I find they don't need to be treated with new drugs as a first line of therapy in my practice.
Let the drugs be tested and proven over the course of years on millions of people to solidify or discredit their effectiveness and side effects.
My patients need not be guinea pigs.
Maybe I am a bit extreme, but then, I deal with the importance of treating individual human beings who have entrusted me to tell them the truth about what I am treating them with. If I don't know the truth, I will say so and that will often mean, I stay away from many a drug promoted to be the newest and best.
Case in point Vytorin, an FDA-approved cholesterol-lowering drug that is prescribed to three million people a month. A new study has found that it appears to increase the risk of cancer. The drug is new and its track record too fresh to determine its true safety.
Vytorin and its companion pill Zetia generated $5 billion in sales last year. Too many doctors have been willing to prescribe it without waiting for more information. I am sure they believed the drug to be safe. I doubt any doctor would ever prescribe a drug thinking it wasn't safe. However, the fact is, we just don't know.
This is a strange world we live in. Here is the story of Vytorin unfolding and what lessons are we learning?
While new drugs get promoted as panacea today, only to flop after hurting people in short order, old drugs like bioidentical hormones that so many doctors are unwilling to prescribe because big pharmaceutical companies are not marketing them, have been proven safe and effective for decades.
Go figure!
At the end of the day, you need to be your own doctor, take responsibility for listening and making your own decisions. It's your health after all!
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