Live Breaking News & Updates on Professor David Grahame Smith

From the NS archive: Swallowing it in silence
2 November 1984: Let the patients decide on the risk of drugs.
By Jad Adams
The people most ignorant about a prescription drug are the patients taking it, wrote Jad Adams in this article from 1984, which argued for a reconfiguring of the British pharmaceutical industry. According to a 1977 law, if pharmaceutical companies informed patients about a drug at all, they were obliged to provide a leaflet detailing information on all side effects. But the industry and doctors argued that juxtaposing major but rare side effects with minor, common ones resulted in a decrease in patient compliance. The (totally legal) alternative was for companies to give absolutely no information at all. Adams described a new method of identifying drug risks that involved doctors recording events which happened to a patient while they were taking the drug, whether they seemed related – a rash, for example – or not – perhaps a broken leg ....

United States , United Kingdom , Laurence Pike , Birchfield Medical Centre , Drug Surveillance Research Unit At Southampton , Committee On Safety Of Medicines , Family Planning Association , Consumers Association Drug , Jad Adams , Professor George , Professor Waters , British Medical Journal , Drug Surveillance Research Unit , Event Monitoring , Prescription Event Monitoring , Professor David Grahame Smith , Working Party , Adverse Reactions , Consumers Association , Therapeutics Bulletin , New Statesman Magazine , International Politics , British Politics , Tony Blair , Gordon Brown , Geoffrey Robinson ,