Survey: Half of US doctors use placebo treatments

[DuncanONeil]

If you have done no testing of the risks of the product you aren't able to produce the information that would allow an individual to make an informed choice. This would be comparable to making an "informed choice" about cigarette smoking in the 1920's. No one knew much if anything about the health effects so in fact people were making an uninformed choice. In the 1920's people would look at you like you were crazy if you said smoking had negative health effects.

You really believe that the only entity that is honest and ethical is the Government? You actually believe that? Remember that the current Speaker promised the most ethical and honest ever. That really proved to be true!!
You really believe that people would "look at you like you were crazy if you said smoking had negative health effects." Even my father, born in 1901, called them coffin nails! Hence your statement is inaccurate.

The fact that smokers have won major lawsuits in the states suggests that drug companies would lose similar lawsuits if they don't carry out due diligence on their medications. Having a national standard does a lot to create a higher burden of proof for liability cases.

Again you assume that they do not engage in due diligence with out thousands of pages of Government regulations? And hundreds of hoops to jump through? Do you think aspirin should be removed from the market? Or Dihydrogenmonoxide?

As for drugs that are in use in nearly every country these statistics can be misleading. For some drugs "nearly every country" means about 60% of the countries on Earth, keeping in mind a sizable portion have very lax standards (much of Africa for instance). In other cases, there are specific health risks that the government raises concerns about, often legitimately. Canada has had a similar situation where there were a few drugs that were approved in a lot of other countries. Some of them were involved in later problems, including voluntary withdrawals by the company and some legal issues.

I believe that the data shows that most of the worlds drug come from American labs. And no I have not checked the figures. Besides there are drugs approved for use in the USofA that have the minor little side effect of DEATH. But essentially you are saying that a drug that exists and shown to have a beneficial effect CAN NOT be used by people in the US under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.

Regarding legal immunity, I would point to Merck's Vioxx. Where the FDA decided what the drug did was so important they were willing to offer it protection from lawsuits on the basis of this condition and permission to continue providing it. The company decided the fact that people with a certain genetic condition would die from taking it, and no test existed for this genetic condition would do so much damage to its brand that even under these conditions it would not continue offering the drug.

Your subject not mine!!

Drug testing standards also limit the damage done by executives who look for short term profits increasing bonuses, at the expense of the long term health of the company. I strongly suspect at least some CEOs that needed to boost profit numbers or face losing their job would be inclined to take a risk on accelerating a drug to market, and possibly cut corners on tests if they weren't held to strict standards. It doesn't have to be every CEO or even most of them. But if even 1 in every 20 CEO's in this situation would do this then you'd be faced with huge problems.

Short term profits?!?! The drug equivalent of a copyright protects any company from competition for 10 years. You the concept of the greedy evil company is moot. As for one in 20 there are not that many in the country.

On the other hand if the drug companies kill off a lot of people with shoddy products, people will be too scared to take medicines and health care costs will go down. I guess there is a plus side to everything. Nonetheless I ask you to forgive me for looking at the lead lining.

If the FDA is voluntary then the choice of the people is not between "good" and "bad" drugs. It is a choice of drugs bearing a seal of approval vs drugs that do not. Heck, do away with the FDA and have somebody like Consumer Reports or UL. Both of whom have a stellar reputation to uphold!