NEWS: Drug Companies Giveth, Taketh Away

CULTURE: Drug Companies Giveth, Taketh Away

Cialis may give you rock hard erections for 36 hours, but it will give you indigestion, stuffy nose, and a headache and really, who wants to fuck Sneezy? Paxil may help with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and panic attacks, but it can cause you to have jaw and neck spasms, nausea, and take away the erection that the Cialis gave you. Thalidomide can be used as a sedative, to treat leprosy, and to help with morning sickness: we all know how that story ends.

For example, Merck & Co. causes the unfortunate side effect of fucking you up. And they face a class-action lawsuit because of Vioxx

Of course, the “Coalition for Healthcare Communication,” whose esteemed members include the American Advertising Federation, American Business Media, the Healthcare Marketing & Communications Council, and the Midwest Marketing Association, have asked the FDA to allow drug companies to run commercials and print advertisements for drugs without listing their side-effects.

When I see an advertisement that tells me that I could develop ulcers, priapism, the dropsy, scurvy, and/or bleeding ass syndrome for taking a pill that gives me a dandy complexion, I have to say the consequences definitely out-weigh the benefits. But then without the announcement of side effects, I would have no idea what the hell the advertisement is about.

Bleeding ass syndrome is real, and is nothing to be joked about.

SPOILERS! (Click to view)

Am I the only one who has had the opposite side effect from Paxil? I could go for hours on those pills

"You idiots, we made money off lying and killing people. We're no going to give it back! I thought we paid off all the politicians that handled this kind of crap."

Doctors are just as much to blame. They push whatever is the flavor of the week, not really knowing if it's actually the right thing.

I have took Vioxx for years for sports related injuries and if I could still get it, I would buy as much as I could get my hands on. But then, I never had any side effects from it.

I don't get why the drug companies are allowed to have ads on tv. It's not like you can run down to the store and pick some up for the fun of it. It requires a prescription from a professional. Oh, and the 'ask your doctor if you need ___" when they don't even tell you what ____ is for really bugs me.

Fuck them. The last few doctors I've seen have been helpless to diagnose anything without a hell of a lot of prompting on my part. The only guy who was any damned use in actually looking at me and trying to see if anything was run before shushing me out the door with a prescription was still in training. I want to know what's wrong with what they're giving me before It gets prescribed for me by a doctor who doesn't give two shits about my welfare.

Am I the only one who's bothered by the fact that giant corporations are running the world?

No. But what can you do about it?

Nice generalization there.

NO medication is completely without side effects. As the consumer it is your job to read the label/ask the pharmacist/ask the doctor/look online/be a big boy and find out if the benefits from the meds are worth the risks. No one is forcing you to take the medicines the doctor prescribes.

And, as Mercie pointed out above, the regulations of drug testing require every little bitty adverse event be reported, which is probably why every drug has a "side effect" of headache or stuffy nose, e.g. symptoms the average person encounters frequently regardless.

Really? Those side effects are rare? Every single woman I know whose been on birth control pills, myself included, has had side effects ranging from irregular bleeding, weight gain, breast tenderness, nausea, headaches, mood changes (such as depression or irritability that magically goes away when you stop taking the BC pills)... There are hundreds of threads in the girls group about the side effects of birth control. I refuse to believe that side effects of birth control pills are rare, since that assertion is contradicted by my experience as a woman with female friends and a participant in female-oriented online communities. It seems to be far more rare to find a birth control pill that matches your body chemistry enough to not give you any side effects, and it seems pretty common that doctors tell women that the side effects are either all in their heads, or are not caused by birth control pills but rather by stress (or, in some cases, by conditions that can be treated with Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac, Wellbutrin, etc, etc, etc)...

The other side of this is that the side of effects of Vioxx were somewhat less rare than the side effects of most BC (notwithstanding Shalome's objection), and also killed people. It also didn't help that Vioxx caused heart attacks in people who were prescribed it specifically for heart conditions like angina- that's like getting chemotherapy for stomach cancer, then getting intestinal cancer from the chemo. Merck withheld data about the adverse side effects when they published studies about Vioxx in scientific journals and also told the FDA a highly nuanced but completely bullshit rationalization about how much Vioxx increased risk of heart attack in comparison to similar drugs. Plus, Merck engaged in a PR blitz to try to assure people that this wasn't the case, and that the documented deaths linked to Vioxx were from something else.

The Merck execs need to be strung up by their heels for at least a few more years before I'll be satisfied.

Vioxx and its family members (Celebrex, Bextra) are not prescribed for angina.

I think what you missed in Mercie's post about birth control was the little ditty about "blood clots". Thankfully quite rare, but do they kill people? Yes, in the form of pulmonary emboli.

"Adverse effects" can range from mildly annoying (irregular spotting, irritability on birth control) to life threatening (blood clots on BC). Do you really expect a drug that messes with your body's natural hormonal fluctuations to the point ovulation is suppressed is really not going to have any side effects at all? It gets back to my original point -- research the potential side effects and decide for yourself if they are worth it. Would you rather bitch about moodiness and cramps, or would you like to be pregnant?

Finally, for all the brouhaha about Vioxx -- good old aspirin causes more deaths annually than asthma or cervical cancer. Should we take that off the market too? Or perhaps education is the answer?

I thought the 'acute pain conditions' it was prescribed for included angina; in fact, a couple of people I know were on it had angina. But I dunno, I guess I misunderstood them.

Does it give you a five-fold chance of dying versus other methods of birth control? More importantly, do the companies who make the various forms of hormonal BC lie to the public about these risks?

No, I actually think that plenty of adverse side effects are not enough to keep a drug off the market if it can still do some good. However, I don't think it's okay for large drug companies to explicitly lie and suppress evidence about the side effects, nor for the FDA to turn a blind eye when they're doing so. The public can't research the potential side effects if the manufacturer lies about them.

Look, this isn't about people accidentally taking overdoses of Vioxx and dying, or taking it despite contraindications, or anything else that is a common reason for people to hurt themselves using all sorts of OTC and prescription drugs. Merck pushed the drug to market while actively suppressing evidence about the severity and frequency of some of its worst side effects, then tried to play dumb when the evidence came out. I talk to scientists at Merck every day, and even the most senior people I know agree: the bean counters got a super drug whose profits they could ride well into the next millenium, but had to look the other way about side effects to make that happen. It's representative of the worst parts of the pharmaceutical industry and set back the work of hundreds of honest, hard-working people by many years. If you want to be the cheerleader for Merck's execs and just expect that the free market will solve the whole thing, be my guest, but I have no idea why you think they can be trusted to provide the information that the public could educate itself with. If they had come out and said that they have a great drug with extremely serious side effects (like a five-fold increase in heart attacks v. other NSAIDs), maybe people would have had that choice.