LogFAQs > #983988928

ParanoidObsessive posted...

In an ideal world, we'd probably be better off having some sort of independent organization devoted solely to doing the research on what medications are best for what conditions, what the side effects are, etc - and then publishing that information for doctors in an easy-to-digest way that keeps them up to date without requiring too much time for them to do their own research. And making it very, very illegal for any drug manufacturer to attempt to sell their product to this group or influence it in any way, meaning its findings will always represent the best data available at the moment and not simply act as further marketing for whichever major drug manufacturer manages to field the best sales team.

Sadly, we definitely don't live in an ideal world.

The problem with that isn't even just not living in an ideal world (recognizing that, very obviously, there are very powerful competing interests that would want to compromise the objectivity of such an organization), it's just the nature of medicine in general. The human body is an unfathomably complex machine. Medical education explains in broad strokes how things work and how to fix them when they don't, but medical practice still consists of a whole lot of trial and error to see what actually works for a given patient's personal medical idiosyncrasies (which can be a product of their genetics, their home environment, their work, their medical history, their personality...). Just look at the whole concept of side effects: many of those effects are vanishingly rare, and in those cases, it's rare that anyone even knows why they happened except to be able to say that they happen very rarely.

Medicine isn't nearly as objective as people would like to think it is, so an independent body objectively laying out the pros and cons of a given drug isn't really possible even before getting into the human/corporate interest side of things.