Walk into your bathroom. Open your
medicine cabinet and take a look. What do you
see? Robitussin? Advil? Dimetapp? Do you know
who makes these products? More important, do you
know whether or not they’re safe?
All of these products are manufactured
by American Home Products—a giant pharmaceutical
company which last year changed its name to Wyeth,
Inc. Wyeth makes a heck of a Chap Stick, but they
also made a number of products whose side effects
were more problematic.
Products like the Dalkon shield
IUD (withdrawn from the market after it caused
infertility in thousands of women); RotaShield
rotavirus vaccine (the only childhood vaccine
ever withdrawn from the market); Cordarone (an
anti-arrhythmiac heart medication which caused
blindness in some users); and most recently, Pondimin
or fenfluramine (half of the infamous “fen-phen”
diet drug combination). Pondimin was recalled
from the market after Dr. Heidi Connolly and others
at the Mayo Clinic reported serious valvular heart
disease among patients using the drug for weight
loss.
This is not intended to single out
Wyeth in particular; Wyeth comes to mind because
we recently completed a group of cases on behalf
of North Carolina residents injured after taking
fen-phen.
Other major pharmaceutical companies
have track records that are nearly as bad. Hoffmann-La
Roche’s acne drug Accutane, for example,
has been implicated in causing birth defects;
Warner-Lambert’s diabetes drug Rezulin caused
severe liver damage in some users; and Bayer’s
anti-cholesterol drug, Baycol, caused a rare muscle
disease called rhabdomyolysis. The list goes on.
In fact, more drugs have been withdrawn from the
market over the last decade than during the entire
history of the FDA prior to that time.
So how can you
be sure that the drugs in your medicine cabinet
are safe? Well, one thing that can help is to
read the label. Under federal regulations, drug
companies must label their products with instructions
for proper usage and warnings about any significant
side effects.
The drug’s label is printed
on the “package insert” (the flyer
the pharmacist gives you along with your medication)
and is also published in a reference book called
The Physicians’ Desk Reference, or PDR,
which is available at your public library. You
should thoroughly read the drug’s label
each time you begin taking a new medication, and
discuss any questions with your doctor.
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