[RJCogburn]

Interesting I guess. But of course meds don't work on everyone and if they do not they are discontinued, or should be.

We ought not to loose sight of the fact that, for those for whom a drug works, the drugs of today are just wonderful.

[Conservativegreatgrandma]

I am not surprised by this and what's more, this doesn't even address undesirable side effects. Natural methods are far more effective and safer.

[Cicero]

Well, and who wouldn't take a drug that could fix cancer, even if the odds were only one in four?

I'm not sure how much good the genetic research mentioned would do, cost wise. Let's suppose that you could do tests eliminating half of those cancer patients as having the wrong kind of genes for the drug, so it was now effective with one patient in two. You would then distribute half as much of that drug, but you would have to charge only a little less than twice as much for it, since most of the cost of a drug is attributable to research and company overhead, and relatively little to actual manufacture. So you probably wouldn't cut health care costs by much.

Granted, if it were a powerful drug with harmful side effects, it would be good to use it only where it could do some good.

[Indie]

The thing that gets me is it always has to be one or the other.
Either the drug execs and government types say RX Drugs are the only ones that work and natural alternatives, including the ones that might hurt the profit of the big guys, are irrelevant and ineffective.
I think anyone who has read the research knows that Rx Drugs work well for most, and natural alternatives can work well for many as well. I use both.
This is a little bit of a surprise to me that he said this. I wonder what his hidden agenda could be??

[ValerieUSA]

Drugs for hypertension (high blood pressure) are conspicuously absent from the list.

[The Great RJ]

That's what doctors are for--to evaluate how effective any drug therapy they provide really is. What's scary is that health insurance companies and governement policy wonks will take this study to justify using the cheapest generic medications rather than those that actually work for the patient.

[aruanan]

Alcohol and the illegal drugs work about 100% of the time.

[avg_freeper]

What incentives do the pharmaceutical companies have to develop more effective drugs? It's not like they have to be competitive or anything. Ahh, the magic of socialism.

[Billthedrill]

I'm afraid that list of efficacies is essentially worthless. Within each of the listed diseases there is a wide range of drugs, each of which has a different efficacy. Some of the leading drugs against a particular disease are discontinued now because something better came along, either in terms of efficacy or side effect.

Rheumatoid arthritis, for example, used to be treated with a bizarre-sounding solution of gold salts - it actually did work for some people. Methotrexate came along with a much better efficacy but it causes liver and kidney damage in some patients and with extended usage that percentage goes up. Modern treatments focus less on the symptoms and more on the causes; tumor necrosis factor inhibitors such as Remicade, Enbrel, and Humira are such approaches and have vastly greater efficacy than Methotrexate. Even greater efficacy has been shown with combinations of these drugs.

The downside to these exotics is expense - human proteins are difficult to produce and the purity has to be nearly perfect. If a test to see if they work may be given a patient before therapy begins a very great deal of time and money and especially patient discomfort might be avoided.

[MainFrame65]

These numbers look about right, and this is no surprise. I have read about some of the psychiatric drug tests, where the real drug was less than twice as effective as the placebo, and both were below 50 percent. Heredity does play a large part, and there are other things at work as well.

For instance, some drugs exhibit a "handedness", or chirality, where the arrangement of atoms within the molecule can have two complementary forms, like a right or left handed glove. Many of the amino acids in our cells exhibit chirality, and the ones that do are invariably left handed. The same is true for most of the many starch and sugar compounds in our bodies.

But while organic production methods may produce chiral molecules, chemical production methods usually produce molecules that are racemic, or an equal mixture of left and right chirality. But tests have proved that for many drugs, only the left (or in some cases, only the right) chiral molecules provide effective therapy. A few companies have produced chiral versions of some drugs, with excellent results, including lower effective dosages and reduced or eliminated side effects.

[Cogadh na Sith]

Considering that for a lot of the problems listed there was no drug therapy at all a few years ago, I think those statistics are quite good.

My response was more of: "Whoa, they make drugs that work for that many people for those problems?!"

Heck, I'd take the odds of taking something if I had even a chance of not having the next migraine, or pants-pissing, or whatever....

There is no 'sure thing' in this world.

[Tall_Texan]

What this means is that those of you with genetic compositions closest to rats and mice are more likely to find effective relief from drug medications.