Pharmaceutical Fantasy

Would you take a drug for the rest of your life if it had one chance out of 165 to prolong your life for five years? Or to put it another way, if it had a 100% chance of prolonging your life for 11 days?

I think the average answer to that question would be, "It depends on who has to pay for it."

"Given ever-increasing prescription drug costs and other health care costs being foisted on the public" No loaded language or bias in this reporting, no sir.

I think he's referring to the recent prescription drug bill which is looking more expensive than originally planned -- some 400 billion. I think it's impossible to estimate how much it will cost because of all the new drugs being developed and the variability in price.

These new anti-cholesterol drugs are a perfect example because so they will be prescribed to so many people -- who probably wouldn't take them if they had to pay for them.

BTW I wonder just how significant is a study of deaths in a sample of 165 people when the difference in effectiveness is 0.6%.

Twenty-two percent of Lipitor patients died or experienced further adverse coronary events during the clinical trial compared to 26 percent of Pravachol patients.

My father recently underwent prostate cancer surgery and his PSA count is now near zero. However his cholestrol went back up to what it was before he started exercising and eating right.

So his doctor recommends going on lipitor. My dad, being a skeptical person, checked it out on the web and found that use of lipitor could cause and increase in cancer cells, as aparently it causes an increase in general cell production.

He told the doctor thanks but no thanks. Urologist didn't know of any connections between lipitor and other statins and cancer. Anyone out here have any knowledge?

My dad, being a skeptical person, checked it out on the web and found that use of lipitor could cause and increase in cancer cells

Like your dad, I've become skeptical of a lot of science recently. There are potentially enormous rewards for research that can prove a drug causes cancer (or to prove a drug is effective). And there are plenty of dishonest scientists willing to provide grist for the malpractice mill or profits for pharmaceutical business.

When a study is done there is confidence level that tells you the probability that the result was caused by random chance. That acceptable level is usually .95, meaning there is one chance out of twenty that the conclusion was false. That means if you do twenty studies you have about an even chance of proving just about anything you want to. With computers, that is easy to do.

Any time a hypothesis is "proved" the study should be done again to eliminate that one out of twenty chance of being wrong. Lawyers don't like them to do that since it is bad for the lawsuit business.

I think your dad has the right idea. We have to become our own scientists.

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