LogFAQs > #983992592

adjl posted...

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.

I don't disagree, but there's still a world of difference between "Medicine is more subjective than most people think", and "This person is literally being paid to sell a product to you, and thus have all the motivation in the world to overpraise the positives and gloss over the negatives. And will use charisma and rhetoric to push product that may not necessarily be the best solution for a given problem."