Progressive Wednesday

Healing Health Care: Watch

Watch:

If you want to have your eyelids peeled back about the pharmaceutical companies and prescription drugs, head on over, once again, to the better-than-good folks at PBS. Their FRONTLINE documentary Dangerous Prescription will make you shake your progressive head. Just click this sentence to see the medicated light.

I'm not sure what else to say. If you'd like four highlights (or lowlights, depending on how you look at it), here goes:

1. “I think Americans need to recognize that every time they put a pill in their mouth — especially a new pill that they’ve never taken before — it’s an experiment,” says Dr. Raymond Woosley, vice president for Health Sciences at the University of Arizona.
2. Since 1997, more than a dozen drugs have been taken off the market due to severe side effects or injuries. It’s a statistic that may surprise the many U.S. consumers who believe that FDA approval guarantees a drug’s safety.
3. “When a drug goes on the market, only about 3,000 patients have ever been given that drug,” says Woosley, who directs a national center that studies drug side effects. “We will never know all the toxicity that can occur, especially the one [patient] in 10,000 or one in 20,000 that could be seriously harmed. Our detection will only happen after the drug is on the market and exposed to a huge number of patients.”
4. The Prescription Drug User Fee Act is legislation passed by Congress that allows drug companies to pay a fee of more than $500,000 with each drug application so that the FDA can hire more drug reviewers, thereby speeding up the drug approval process. Critics say the law has pushed the FDA too close to the pharmaceutical companies it is charged with regulating. FRONTLINE speaks with a former FDA safety officer, who recounts being pressured to tone down or alter negative drug reviews in order to speed approval of a new drug. Another tells of suffering agency retribution and retaliation for recommending against a drug’s approval.

Like I said, it’ll peel your eyelids back, which then, I suppose, will need medical attention. So let’s hope I only mean it metaphorically. Let’s hope.